Mystery new luxury SUV set to surface for real in Beijing.
Audi has given the public a first glimpse of a mystery new SUV widely believed to be the long-awaited Audi Q8.
A solitary image on social media from the German car-maker purportedly shows off the new high-rider, with some speculation suggesting the full version will be shown at the 2018 Beijing motor show this week.
The teaser image does exactly that, with a bold side profile accented by fluorescent tape. Other than the five-spoke wheels, most of the vehicle’s other visual aspects have been cloaked in darkness.
The vehicle in question bears uncanny resemblance to the Q8 show car shown at the Detroit motor show in January, particularly the aggressively sloped roofline and fastback-style tailgate. It also has more than a passing familiarity with the Lamborghini Urus, which is underpinned by the same platform.
The seemingly production-ready concept revealed in Detroit provides plenty of clues as to what we should expect. Ditto the Sport version of the Q8 that Audi followed up with at the Geneva motor show.
The four-seat Q8 concept used a standard 12-volt electrical system and added a 17.9kWh lithium-ion battery for the exclusive use of the electric motor.
The all-wheel drive Audi 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.
While the powertrain technology will make it into production (well, maybe not the monster wheels, though 22-inch rubber isn’t out of the question), the big reason the Q8 exists is to bring a bit of sex appeal and authority back to the big end of Audi’s SUV town.
The big-rig sits on the same 2.99-metre wheelbase as the Audi Q7. It uses the longest version of the MLB Evo architecture, which was engineered by ex-Audi development boss Dr Ulrich Hackenberg, for longitudinally mounted engines.
It’s actually shorter than the existing SUV range-topper by 30mm, though its 2.04-metre width is 70mm wider and its 1.7-metre height is 40mm lower, to help confirm its ‘coupe’-style status.
The heavily sculpted single-frame grille is now a squashed octagon, filled with honeycomb inserts and far wider than any other production Audi grille.
There are six vertical double bars to give it height as well as the obvious width and it’s flanked by air intakes and an aluminium blade that pull the eye downward.
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 computer controlled and dynamically change to suit the road conditions and are even capable of projecting pedestrian crossings onto the street or to put path lines down for the driver to follow in tighter roadwork situations.
The key interior concept is the move away from switches and towards touch-screens, plus a contact-analogue system for the head-up display.
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 like overlaying the HUD’s navigation arrows on top of actual turn arrows painted on the road.
The 12.3-inch virtual cockpit still runs 1920×720-pixel resolution, though Audi insists it has better graphics with more detail and new features. Even with the sloping roofline, the Q8 retains 630 litres of standard luggage space (well down on the Q7’s 890 litres), while the front of the cabin uses a full wrap-around lip at the base of the windscreen.
The Q8’s frameless doors are slated for production, too, and help with the SUV’s flatter roofline, and all of the car’s lines are pointed towards its strong rear-end.
The concept car’s doors all open on touch sensors and no longer need to be pulled, and they automatically open to a pre-defined setting, claimed to be helpful for people with tight garages.
The flat, wide C-pillar is supposedly reminiscent of the Ur quattro, too, and take almost directly from the ‘prologue’ concept car. But 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 both 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 the braking force.
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