There's A Typo On The Dash Of The Porsche 911

Photo: Liesa Johannssen-Koppitz/Bloomberg (Getty Images)

Porsche could use a proofreader, according to a track-day-loving enthusiast in Texas. The carmaker has overlooked a misspelled word that allegedly exists in the driver’s display of the Porsche 911, which a Porsche Club of America (PCA) member in Houston noticed after someone asked for recommendations on new brake pads — or “break” pads, as the misspelling on the 911 display reads.

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Twitter user (or X, if you prefer) Zerin Dube posted a photo that was shared on a Texas PCA Facebook group and captioned it with the phrase “look closely:”

The request for replacement brake pads suggestions came from an unknown PCA member who had participated in a High Performance Driver Education (HPDE) course. In case the photo gets swallowed up by the World Wide Web, the warning prompt on the 911 dashboard reads, “BRAKE WEAR: Brake pads worn….Change break pads…Driving permitted.”

Notice the third use of the word brake reads “break.” Rookie mistake, Porsche. I should know because I’ve made the same error and been made fun of at work. Copyeditors can be mean though you wouldn’t know it from the looks of them.

What makes the error on the 911 dashboard notable — other than the fact that this is a high-end sports car with a typo, of course — is that the word brake is spelled correctly three other times: twice within the circular gauge, and another time where “BRAKE WEAR” is indicated in red next to the fuel level gauge.

Brake pads, brake pads, break pads! Look, I get it Porsche. Sometimes, you repeat a word over and over again until it gets all jumbled up in your head. The error becomes easy to miss and then suddenly it’s on the dashboard of your $115,000 car, which is how much the cheapest new 911 costs.

It’s unclear if the misspelling of “break pads” only affects the 911 or whether the typo appears on other Porsche models. It’s likely the error is somewhere in the programming of the 911’s digital display, meaning the fix may be pretty simple to push in an update. Otherwise, models that are affected by the typo could end up being sold on the internet in another ten or twenty years for an outrageous amount of money, all because Porsche forgot to use the spell check.