Family planning: It’s the TT Sportback concept
Audi unveils another TT-based crossover, a fivedoor coupe-hatch. This, or another squished SUV?
Just as Fiat has expanded its 500 family to incorporate a mini-MPV (500L) and mini-crossover (500X), so Audi is readying a breeding programme for its new TT coupe. Earlier this year we saw the TT Of-road concept, which posited a small SUV based on the sports car’s MQB underpinnings, while this month brings the TT Sportback concept, a CLA-rivalling amalgam of coupe and 5dr hatch.
The Sportback concept is 29cm longer and 6cm wider than the latest TT coupe, though a few centimetres lower too. “We’re using the TT design language because it’s accepted and iconic,” explains Audi engineering boss Ulrich Hackenberg. Not to mention the cachet of that name: buyers would, Audi reckons, prefer to be driving something with a TT rather than an A3 badge.
Happily, this concept is no mere pastiche. The aluminium-bodied Sportback doesn’t just blag its design cues from the TT, but uses that car’s dash, seats, engines and quattro system. Hackenberg says it could even take the 5cyl engine from the TT RS and upcoming RS3.
However, the show car’s production readiness is underlined by the presence of the latestgen 2.0-litre TFSI engine, whose turbos have been tweaked to help it produce just short of 400bhp. The transmission is Audi’s dual-shift seven-speed auto, driving all four wheels.
Conceptual mishmash the TT Sportback might be, but it resolves its diverse infuences rather neatly. However, Hackenberg tells TopGear the fve-door coupe-hatch TT is less likely to reach production than that SUV-crossover (bottom). “I see the best chance [of production] as the SUV,” Hackenberg says. “It would do best on the market. It did well in clinics.”
We’re told a production TT Of-road could reach the road within two years. Impressive alacrity from Audi, but does the world really need yet another entry into the crowded but booming SUV-crossover-coupe segment instead of this slick little fve-door with its lightweight alloy body?