Audi Grand Sphere previews A8 replacement

Audi is introducing three new advanced design studies over the next 12 months, all connected by a ‘sphere’ metaphor in their respective model names.

The vehicles will be the Audi Sky Sphere, the Urban Sphere and a third concept – the 2021 Audi Grand Sphere – that previews a long, luscious high-tech flagship model.

For the moment, the company is revealing little about the Audi Sky Sphere, which is set to make its debut at the Monterey Car Week at Pebble Beach next month, thus promising to be a car that will turn heads – and presumably win hearts with high performance and dynamic prowess.

Even less has been revealed about the Audi Urban Sphere, which is designed for “big metropolitan areas” and will premiere in 2022.

Instead, the German premium brand has opened up with teaser images and partially obscured photographs in the design studio of the svelte Audi Grand Sphere that will be unveiled at the IAA in Munich during September.

During an online presentation last week, Audi’s head of exterior design, Philip Römers, revealed that the Grand Sphere previews an all-new model due mid-decade that’s set to succeed the current Audi A8.

“The Grand Sphere is clearly much closer to reality [than the other concepts], and we’ve already communicated that around about the year 2025 we want to have a new vehicle positioned in the upper [large] segment, the luxury segment,” he said via an interpreter.

“The Grand Sphere is definitely an outlook on that.

“Especially when you talk about design language – exterior and interior – we want to bring as many of these design elements into production as possible.”

Römers indicated that the Grand Sphere will retain a masked version of Audi’s single-frame grille, just like the Audi e-tron and the e-tron GT.

It is also likely to share some of its architecture and underpinnings with the Audi Aicon concept car from 2017, but Römers noted some key differences.

“The concepts of the cars [Aicon and Grand Sphere] are different worlds,” he said.  

“Looking at the similarities, both are luxury-class vehicles, have a footprint of a long-wheelbase A8 roughly.

“But the differences, really, are that the Aicon was geared towards autonomous driving on Level 5. The cabin has absolute pride of place – maximum space, and that’s why you have the A-[pillar] very far to the front of the car.

“But in the Grand Sphere we’re looking at Level 4 of automated driving. And here, of course, the driver still has the possibility to actually drive the car.”

The teaser images released show the Grand Sphere to be long, with suicide doors for access to the rear and no B-pillars to obstruct access.

But it’s the front seats that will be geared to lounge-room comfort, the company says, hammering the final nail into the coffin of job security for chauffeurs.

“So far, and it has been true for the last 120 years, interior design was geared towards the driver, so that [he or she] would assume 100 per cent [of] the driving job,” Audi’s head of design, Marc Lichte, stated during the presentation.

“If that is no longer the case, then of course we have an opportunity to create a completely new cabin. And that, in our vision, shall be alongside your work and your home, a third living space – and that would be like a lounge.”

The Audi design chief also said that as the global automotive industry comes to rely less on internal combustion powertrains, there are opportunities to stretch the wheelbase and push wheels out to the four corners of the car, without extending front and rear overhangs.

Furthermore, interior packaging is improved significantly once the engineers do away with multi-step transmissions.

With the Audi Grand Sphere equipped for Level 4 autonomy, there’s no longer a need for a chauffeur.

The owner of the vehicle will be able to sit up front, enjoying all the comfort and convenience features the car has to offer and still enjoy the privileges of being a passenger, if he or she should wish.

In this regard, the Grand Sphere is not dissimilar from the Aicon, although the Grand Sphere does have its own steering wheel, whereas the Aicon did not.

Different levels of autonomy aren’t necessarily grounds for distinctly different styling and packaging, so the Grand Sphere appears to have been developed to gauge reaction from the public to the car’s styling, as an alternative to the Aicon, rather than testing the public’s feelings about handing over all driving to the car.

Other features to stand out in the cabin of the Grand Sphere are the large centre console, which houses a minibar (or ‘refreshment unit’, as Audi describes it, stressing that it is intended for non-alcoholic drinks), and what appears to be a combination grab handle and dial that resembles an old-fashioned window winder.

Audi’s head of interior design, Norbert Weber, described this feature as “concierge function”.

This control can be used to operate basic comfort and convenience facilities, with more advanced functions mapped to each control (one for each of the car’s seats).

Each of the four passengers will have their own climate control zone, and temperature settings for each zone will be operable through the concierge function.

Weber also anticipates that voice recognition to control functions of the car will be ever more important in future.

Like the Sky Sphere and the Urban Sphere, the Audi Grand Sphere will be the embodiment of digitisation (of design), electric mobility and autonomous motoring, according to Audi spokesman Josef Schlossman, who also explained the ‘Sphere’ theme.

“The Sphere is a living space,” he said. “It’s the world that surrounds us. In this particular instance it means of course the living sphere of the car – which is more than just the interior, the cabin of the car.

“It’s a place that also stands for ‘connection’ – between the inside and the outside.”

The three concept cars echo the work of Audi’s three design centres around the world.

With the Grand Sphere to make its debut in Munich, it represents the company’s studio in Ingolstadt; the Sky Sphere, launching in Pebble Beach, represents the work of Audi’s Malibu (Los Angeles) studio; and the Urban Sphere has presumably been the work of the Beijing studio in China.