The Concept C Is the All-Electric Sports Car Kick-Starting Audi’s Design Future

Car companies love a ngo statement. With nan presence of nan Concept C, Audi’s caller 1 is crystal clear: “radical simplicity.” An all-electric two-seater pinch a retractable folding difficult top, nan Concept C is simply a “progressive interpretation” of nan company’s legacy, says Audi—and it's not difficult to spot that nan TT has factored beautiful heavy successful that.

But arsenic you prime your measurement done nan messaging—key words present are precision and clarity, arsenic good arsenic a reemphasis connected our aged friend “Vorsprung durch Technik”—this feels for illustration a important reset aft a play of artistic drift. This isn’t conscionable a portion of conceptual oculus candy, then: It’s Audi engaging combat mode successful an manufacture presently beset pinch challenges.

“Our imagination is simply a telephone to action for nan full company—and is basal for making our marque genuinely unique erstwhile again,” Audi main imaginative serviceman Massimo Frascella explains. “It is nan accuracy down each determination we make, and we purpose to use its principles crossed nan full organization. We telephone it ‘the Radical Next.’”

Let’s commencement pinch nan car itself. Although nan e-tron GT group nan barroom high, Audi’s exemplary scope has been ray connected coherence and drama. The Concept C isn’t rather a first-principles machine, but it decidedly strips things backmost and seeks to stoke immoderate bully old-fashioned flames of desire. It’s a terrific looking point successful nan flesh: stocky, solid, and charismatic. Audi CEO Gernot Döllner, successful complaint for precisely 2 years, personally pushed for a caller sports car; Frascella utilized it to push nan boundaries successful position of creation productivity and manufacturing technique.

It’s besides 1 for marque historians: Although there’s thing explicitly retro here, nan 1930s Auto Union Type C Grand Prix car, nan early-noughties Rosemeyer concept, and much pertinently nan original TT are each successful nan mix, arsenic is Bauhaus and German modernism.

Frascella, it should beryllium noted, is an Italian who roseate to prominence arsenic caput of creation astatine Jaguar Land Rover, and he is credited pinch nan existent Range Rover, a universally admired conveyance (though he besides worked connected nan alternatively much polarizing Jaguar Type 00.) A deficiency of adornment and committedness to what car designers are wont to telephone “monolithic” surfaces are evidently 2 of his trademarks.

That overmuch is surely evident here. The Concept C’s taut, machined look suggests thing carved from a elephantine billet of aluminum, and there’s a beardown caller vertical front-grille style pinch a slim but powerful ray signature that echoes nan four-ring logo. We reckon it’s champion appreciated from an elevated position supra nan rear three-quarters, though. There’s nary rear window, minimal decoration, and slender LED taillights, pinch 3 slats successful nan rear platform to propose a much emotionally charged, mid-engined configuration. We’re told nan windowless, slatted look will make production, and nan caller car is slated to get successful 2027.