New Audi SUV set to jump the sedate Q
FUTURE MODELS/ Near production-ready Q8 concept car will lower Q7’s boring factor with sassy styling and a gnashing grille, writes Michael Taylor
If you like an SUV with terrific interiors, a brilliant ride and handling and exquisite technology wrapped in something other than granddad’s suit, Audi finally has something for you.
The Q8 concept car is a powerful, economical plug-in hybrid set to morph into a production car in 2018 — and Audi says it will be visually close to the Detroit showstopper.
Of course, while the show car is a pure plug-in hybrid with 1,000km of combined range, the production Q8 will run the full gamut of the Q7’s powertrain range, including petrol and diesel six-cylinder motors and, eventually, the crunching 48V, electric compressor tech of the SQ7 wondercar.
PURPOSEFUL
But for now the Q8 concept is only to be found with a combined 330kW of power and 700Nm of system output, wrapped in a 5.02m skin that looks far more purposeful and aggressive than the ultra-conservative Q7.
It is mainly powered by a 3.0l TFSI petrol V6, which uses turbocharging and direct and indirect fuel injection. With 225kW of power and 500Nm of torque, it’s basically the same engine found sprinkled throughout the Audi MLB family, including the A4, A5, Q5 and Q7.
The difference is it’s mated here to a 100kW, 330Nm electric motor, mounted within the eight-speed automatic transmission, which helps pull the combined claimed consumption figure down to just 2.3l per 100km, which isn’t bad for a two-tonne machine.
Its CO2 emissions figure is just 53g per km, which is well below the 95g fleet-average figure demanded by 2020’s EU7 emissions rules.
The four-seat concept uses a standard 12V electrical system and adds a 17.9kW/h lithium-ion battery for the exclusive use of the electric motor.
The rear-mounted lithiumion battery uses 104 prismatic cells to give it up to 60km of pure zero-emission driving range, which is enough for most day-to-day city work, and can be fully recharged in two and a half hours from a 7.2kW charging system.
It can be driven in full battery-electric mode, with zero emissions, or in the default hybrid mode or in a battery-hold mode that uses the petrol engine to save the battery charge for when it’s needed, such as on a high-speed highway en route to a congested city centre.
The all-wheel drive Q8 will ride on an air suspension system that gives the concept car (and the production car) a 90mm height range, so it can be lowered for easier entry and exit and for high-speed driving, or raised for off-road work.
It helps its production future that the big rig sits on the same 2.99m wheelbase as the Q7. It uses the longest version of the MLB Evo architecture, which was engineered by ex-Audi development boss Ulrich Hackenberg, for longitudinally mounted engines. Smaller versions of the architecture sit beneath the A4, the A5 and the Q5, but the Q8 is essentially a reskinned Q7 in its underbits.
It’s actually shorter than the existing SUV range-topper by 3cm, although its 2.04m width is 7cm wider and it’s 1.7m height is 4cm lower, to confirm its “coupe”-style status.
But to see the exaggerated, broad, aggressive grille is to understand what the Q8 is all about — it’s a reset for the visuals. The car maker is officially suggesting the key visual driver is “elegance”, but it’s far more purposeful than that. The sloping roofline still delivers lots of rear headroom and plenty of luggage space, but is dominated by the most aggressive grille on any Audi to date.
The heavily sculpted singleframe grille is now a squashed octagon, filled with honeycomb inserts and wider than any other production Audi grille. It’s also flanked by an extraordinary advance on Audi’s Matrix LED headlight technology, with the Q8 moving to a Matrix laser system that has enough resolution detail to double as a movie projector for your garage wall.
With a million pixels, the lights are incredibly detailed and can keep the car at high beam while blacking out the exact pixels to light up a pedestrian without shining light directly on his or her face.
The lights are computercontrolled and dynamically change to suit various road conditions — they are even capable of putting down path lines for the driver to follow in tighter roadwork situations.
KEY CONCEPT
The key interior concept moves away from switches towards touchscreens, plus a contactanalogue system for the headup display (HUD).
It’s still all based around the fully digital “virtual cockpit”, but the contact-analogue HUD delivers intelligent augmented reality to merge the real and virtual worlds.
Like all HUDs, it projects important information onto the windscreen in the driver’s line of sight, but it steps this up with tricks such as overlaying the HUD’s navigation arrows on top of actual turn arrows painted on the road.
The Q8’s frameless doors are slated for production, too, and help with the SUV’s flatter roofline. The doors open on touch sensors and can be programmed to different settings, claimed to be helpful for people with tight garages.
The flat, wide C-pillar is supposedly reminiscent of the Ur quattro and is taken almost directly from the Prologue con- cept car and, unlike many concept cars, the front and rear wheels are identical, rather than exaggerated at the rear.
A lighting strip stretches across the entire width of the tail, forming the stop light and the indicators, and all of the functions are dynamic, with the indicators stretching outwards and the brake light varying in intensity depending on braking force.
“The Q8 concept is an Audi in its best form. It demonstrates the strengths of our brand in technology as well as in design and provides an outlook on a future SUV in series,” said Dietmar Voggenreiter, Audi’s member of the board of management for sales and marketing. the