Ah, Audi, you lovable bunch of emotion-shunning people, you. In a recent interview, Audi’s chief of design, Marc Lichte, was talking about the themes for a new concept car Audi is about to unveil at the Los Angeles Motor Show this month. His eyes casting about the room for a linguistic toe-hold, Lichte sprang for the only assurances most automakers seem to know these days.
Sportiness and emotion.
Sportiness we can understand. It connotes athleticism, agility, energy, spryness—a nice, succinct package when you want to tell people your car isn’t mechanically brain-dead.
But emotion—that’s the top-shelf word for automakers. It suggests that to engineers, “emotion” is this secret world regular people inhabit where things like “feelings” and “intimacy” are kind of like a turbocharger for your heart, or at least the prefrontal cortex of your brain. Something neurologically mappable or chemically discernible, to be sure.
So this new concept will reflect “emotion,” that great catch-all that is basically anything that can’t be described by calculus. In more practical terms, the above video indicates that this concept will be a four-door coupe. Because Lichte started in his position only last year, this concept is really the first look we’ll have at the new design future for Audi.
There are rumors that this concept could foretell the shape of a new model for Audi, the A9. Lichte has two mandates: design 11 new model lines by 2020, and differentiate all existing model lines more so than they are today. Audi design is very good, very tight, but there have been some charges that the family resemblance is a little too strong at the moment. Lichte was brought in from Volkswagen to inject a little madness into the mix.
The news-revealing days of the LA Auto Show are November 18-20, so that’s our target for learning more about Audi’s future.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for an A6 in Raleigh, stop by Audi Raleigh.