Just two years ago, Audi had two sports cars in its lineup: the TT and the R8. Now, it has zero. With no halo car to point towards, the German carmaker feels like a bit of a lost brand, now best known for fumbling to decide what to name its latest forgettable EV. The company plans to right that wrong today with the introduction of a new, TT-esque concept. Pictures of the two-door coupe have leaked ahead of tonight’s reveal, and it looks… excellent?
This concept car, originally leaked by Audi Canada’s social channel over the weekend before being taken down, takes on the TT’s general silhouette, with a tight cabin and a swooping roof that culminates at the rear. Its proportions are far more dramatic, however, with bigger wheels and larger overhangs. It feels like the first truly distinctive design from Audi in years.
Then there’s that nose. As Autocar points out, the vertical opening is reminiscent of Auto Union’s Grand Prix cars of the 1930s. But the squared off shape also takes influence from Audi’s Avus concept from 1991. The thin headlights are a popular trend with concepts and production cars alike; the whole thing reminds me of the “Mimic” monsters from that Tom Cruise movie, Edge of Tomorrow. And I love it.
Being a leak, there’s no word on specs (or even a name) for this concept, though the internet seems to believe it’ll be fully electric. Going by the windshield wipers, the full interior, and the real side mirrors, it seems pretty close to production, too. In an interview last month with German magazine Bild (and translated by Motor1), Audi CEO Gernot Döllner called this concept the “TT Moment 2.0,” describing it as a “highly emotional sports car.” He also said a production version would arrive within the next two years.
Instead of calling the car an outright TT replacement, Döllner told Bild this new car would be “something in between” a TT and the dearly departed R8. That explains the longer wheelbase and wider track. It also makes a lot of sense—having two dedicated sports cars in Audi’s lineup wasn’t sustainable for the brand, so combining that task into one vehicle is an apt solution. As cool as an Audi-skinned Lamborghini Temerario sounds, it’s almost certainly not happening. It’s either this or nothing, Audi fans.
I’m a longtime believer in halo cars. When a brand has a car that customers can look up to and strive for, it gets them in the door and makes them fans of a company’s overall ethos. Halo cars are good internally, too. Engineers and designers can lean on such a model to develop more striking design cues and better performance. Even if this car is electric, it’s better than nothing at all. What’s that saying? A rising tide lifts all boats. That sorta makes sense in this situation, right?
In any case, the world will know a lot more about this Audi concept later today, when the company releases more information. Keep an eye out here for updates.
I think it looks a lot better than what Audi’s building right now. Clean lines and a distinctive shape. Audi never should have chamfered the corners on their rectangles.
Audi hasn’t made an attractive car in years. Generic jellybean shaped cars that look more like 90’s GM products than anything. But it has a name.
But blended with angry fish
No one: “You know….that Jaguar concept is really onto something”
Audi: “Halte mein Bier.”
Touch pad window “switches” ?
That would be another “solution” to a problem no one has ever complained about.
If it had the front of the 1st gen TT and the rear of the 1st gen R8, minus all unnecessary grilles/openings since it’s electric, and was more curvy, it might actually look okay.
As it is now… *woof woof*
It’s as if auto execs are deliberately demanding that everything be made ugly, and the designers are just getting paid to design what they are told…
Well, maybe we will get lucky and after this “brutalist” trend runs it’s course, streamliner will become the new cool. Maybe with a titch of art deco thrown in…
Doubtful that we will see that outside of some world-changing crisis that destroys the auto industry as we know it.
Once you go streamliner, everything else is a step backward. It would be the end of planned-obsolescence in design. Everything we have seen since the 1930s after it was understood that the performance and operating cost of a car could be dramatically improved with streamlining, has been an effort to delay going that design route under the justification that “people won’t want to buy it”, when the people have never been given the chance to buy an affordable, mass-produced, highly-streamlined car in the first place.
The closest things offered for sale within the USA by a mainstream manufacturer were lukewarm mass-produced half-measures like the 2nd/3rd/4th gen Toyota Prius, 1st gen Honda Insight, Citroen DS, or Tesla Model 3, with varying degrees of success, a token hand-built number of vehicles never intended for mass consumption such as the GM EV1 or VW XL1, and an assortment of boutique/rare/hand-built quasi-streamlined sports cars from half a century or more ago which today typically auction for 6-figures or more and almost never get driven on the roads in public.
I hope Aptera can get a foothold into the market. Its obvious benefits over its competition could drive any competition in that direction just by virtue of being available at all. The heavy 2.5 ton Lucid Air with a frontal area almost as large as an SUV being as efficient on the highway as a 1st gen Nissan Leaf that weighs close to half as much also says a lot.
Our relative peak as a civilization is exemplified by designs such as the Ferrari 250GTO, Jaguar D-Type, Lotus Elite/Elan, Porsche 550, Alfa Romeo TZ, and such, and those were all a half-century or more ago, and command massive sums of money at auctions because their aesthetic is both desired and extremely rare. This present-day brutalist trend in cars is a massive step backward aerodynamically even from some of those aforementioned half-century+ year old offerings, but fits the zeitgeist of where we are currently at as a civilization, and it is not at all a good place…
Just another reason why you should never give a monkey a computer to design a vehicle.
Some rear glass would make this a solid halo car design, at least a lot more handsome than Jaguar’s, though I still don’t get the electric sports car/halo car thing.
When you can package a thousand horsepower inside the floor, form factor doesn’t affect performance that much anymore. Center of gravity and weight distribution are a non-issue, as is driveline packaging, and any added bodywork weight is negligible next to the battery pack’s mass, so a coupe just doesn’t make sense for that purpose.
Since this is a German car in 2025 we know they’ll double down on power and acceleration, and since it’ll probably be sold in the US, they’ll triple down on range. I’d be very surprised if it weighs less than 4,000lb. Not exactly pleased, just surprised.
A coupe makes sense emotionally. Should they have built yet another high-performance crossover or SUV and said, “this is our halo car?” Not the same, even slightly. Two seats are most desired, or 2+2 but it still must have two doors.
I think to be a halo car, a coupe is just more attractive, desired, and fitting for any brand, except when it has an image base that is miles away like Land Rover. Its impracticality may be a bonus. A “hot chick” or “hot guy” will always by default be more viscerally attractive than “hot mom” or a “hot dad.”
I agree that a coupe body doesn’t make nearly as much sense to improve the performance of an electric vehicle. So, it’s not about improving performance. It’s about being the thing they need it to be.
I tend to agree, but coupes that share a platform with their 4-door mates usually make for somewhat shabby flagships. There’s just not enough to differentiate them, and people always take the malicious read: A 5-series isn’t a sedan that handles like a coupe, the 8-series is the coupe that drives like a sedan. Style definitely matters for a GT/luxury car, but as a flagship, it must offer substance in a way that the rest of the range can’t.
That’s not possible if they use a standard EV approach, which is what I strongly suspect they will do. My point isn’t so much that there’s no market for a coupe right now, and more so that an EV coupe doesn’t do that much PR work as a flagship.
If I was in Audi’s shoes, I’d pick one of two options: beg/borrow/steal a manual transmission from VW or Porsche and do what I must to update the inline 5 for , or make a hybrid/electric RS8, with a 2-door sedan variant available, call that an A9, and make that the flagship, with emphasis on luxury.
What I wouldn’t do is make a new coupe that visually communicates compromises made for performance (small cabin, smaller windows, low roofline, mid-engined proportions), then plonk it onto the same type of platform that the whole industry is using for family SUV’s.
Look, I really hope Audi knocks it out of the park, subverts all expectations, and makes a sub-3500lb EV coupe with balanced handling, a low seating position and engaging driving feedback, but hope is thin on the ground these days. I’ll even be satisfied if it’s a half-decent LC500 competitor, but Lexus is the only GT car you can buy with a naturally aspirated V8, and all of its compelling competition have twin-turbo V8’s.
Interesting points. So, you would say, it just doesn’t make sense to make any full-electric coupe-style sports car or GT then? E.g. no electric Aston Martins?
Close, but not quite.
I think it doesn’t make sense to market such a vehicle as the top of the range: If it can’t substantially outperform or at least out-experience the next-best car for reasons inherent to the platform, it just doesn’t shine as a halo car.
By all means, there is a buyer somewhere for an electric GT car, maybe even a full-on 2-seater sports car, and it can be a profitable product, even a good one. However, it just isn’t the product to represent a brand.
Half the issue with the “package a thousand horsepower inside the floor” paradigm is that everyone can do it.
“And when everyone’s super, no one will be” -Buddy Pine, i.e. Syndrome
You need to give people something no one else offers, and a pretty coupe with a lot of power isn’t that. In an ICE vehicle, they could offer a unique engine sound/character (inline-5’s were Audi’s calling card for a while), an advanced drive system nobody else in the segment can offer (Torsen-based Quattro or later torque-vectoring variants), some unusual engineering practice (The all-aluminum space-frame of the A8) or a special packaging solution (mid-engine layout, or AWD coupes back when the competition was RWD).
With an EV, most platform characteristics are a given. They all have 50-50 weight distribution, they can all have multiple motors with torque vectoring, they’re all silent, and they’re all quick. Unless Audi is uniquely positioned to deliver an electric driving experience that no one else can, any EV flagship must distinguish itself in some other way that is unique to Audi, otherwise it’ll just be mashing its head against the wall of existing flagship luxury sedans from EV-first companies like Lucid. Whether or not Lucid survives, it’s not good for Audi if their flagship is praised for being “almost as good as the Lucid Air Sapphire, with half as many doors”.
They could try to stand out in comfort, but that’s a metric with tough competition, and Audi is currently lagging behind. Crucially, if the interior is too expensive to scale down to an A3 in a way that makes the buyer feel good, then it’s not a very effective flagship.
I guess my point is that EV’s are too similar mechanically, and a flagship needs to incorporate as much as possible of what makes your brand unique, ideally in a way that can be echoed all the way down the range. To that end, you can showcase more comfort features in a sedan and more practical solutions in an SUV.
EV’s are in an era of refinement, where innovation comes at great cost and yields incremental improvements in range/efficiency, which are real benefits, but don’t give the customer an appreciably different experience over existing EV’s.
I don’t hate it. It’s kind of throwing back to early last century Auto Union race cars with that upright grille and “floating fenders”. Even the little slit headlights go with that theme, sort of like the sun glinting off chrome. On smaller wheels with more sidewall, this would look better.
I think if it was on smaller wheels it would look absolutely monolithic and super heavy. It needs bigger wheels to take some of the visual weight off the body, but it just needs better-looking ones and a longer wheelbase. And a bag over the front end.
Reminds me of the new Jaguar, which is not a good thing
Looks like bits and pieces of the OG TT, “I,Robot” RSQ, and Rosemeyer concept blended together. I don’t hate it, though in true Audi fashion the proportions are working against it.
People jumping to the Jaguar comparison are being reductive. The Jaguar is crude with exaggerated proportions purely for shock value whereas this concept is a nod to Audi’s Bauhaus-inspired era, where form follows function.
When Audi claimed Bauhaus-inspired design, that was nothing more than marketing wank. Any automaker could claim that their designs adhere to the spirit of Bauhaus since the death of tailfins.
I do not agree that the Jaguar comparisons are out of place. They both make a hard turn into brutalism from their previous (handsome) designs. Compare previous TT models or the R8 to this and while it can be claimed that it is certainly not derivative of the earlier cars, one might do well to derive a handsome car from handsome parents.
This concept neither strikes me as attractive nor does it convey a sense of athletics; it feels like they’re doing the same thing Jaguar did and BMW before them. Create something more garish and unpleasant than the others just so people will recognize it.
I do not want to credit the Cybertruck for anything other than bad things, but I think we’re seeing the impact of trying to foist ugly cars onto the general public and then claiming that they’re original and good. They may be novel, but that does not mean they are attractive.
It’s giving Rosemeyer concep vibes. I don’t really like the square grill though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_Rosemeyer
Jaguar wants their design back.
Have they finally figured out how to put that ugly cat back in the bag?
The cat is dead. RIP
Just once, I’d love to see a concept car with regular sized wheels. Sheesh.
Also, that interior shot reminds me a 90s Ford concept interior for some reason that I cannot fully explain at the moment.
The side shot doesn’t give me TT vibes at all, but rather a downsized Rolls Royce Wraith.
As people say on the interwebs…thanks! I hate it.
I also look forward to a production version with real, smaller wheels.
Agreed on the Wraith roofline
The Hitler Moustache Grille is just the thing these days…
I can’t unsee it now
So I’m guessing someone at VW/Audi saw what Jaguar came up with and decided they wanted a piece of that. Because that is exactly what this looks like. So much so that I initially assumed the article was about another Jag but this time in silver.
The exterior is flat out awful, but that lone interior shot, that is intriguing. Especially compared to the touch-pad infested glossy plastic abominations Audi has been foisting on us as of late. Round steering wheels > All other shapes. End of story.
I recently watched the Savagegeese video comparing the SQ5 and X3 M40i and the Audi’s interior is a war crime. Three screens, haptic bullshit on the steering wheel, and not a button in sight. It’s been pretty unanimously agreed that that shit sucks but they’re just not taking no for an answer….
The concept is interesting. But I’m glad it’s just a concept.
Copying Jaguar’s homework was a bad idea.
Did I see that correctly? It looks like there’s no back glass or rear windscreen or whatever the cool kids call it these days.
The sightlines in this thing look pretty poor. Glob forbid you actually want to you know, see out of the car so that you can pass, park or whatever it is that humans typically do in cars.
Who needs rear windows when you have complex electronic/camera systems instead? Never fear, you can count on Ze Germans to over engineer a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. They’ve spearheaded the revolt against physical buttons so I’m not surprised that they’re coming for rear windows now.
THEY’RE COMING FOR OUR WINDOWS NOW!!!!
Sounds better when you exaggerate it. 😛
I am absolutely gonna fucking scream.
Have all the car designers gone on holiday? Ye gods, the comments have it right; Temu, Jaguar BS, etc. I know concept cars are never really realistic, but lately it is awful. My 2 cents opinion, obviously, and others may have different thoughts, but jeez.
I honestly, truly, think that the design talent is not going to Europe any more. They’re going to Korea, China, Japan, and even the US. The only consistently attractive cars coming out of Europe any more are from the French. Literally every other European automaker is falling on their face so hard in the design department, but the Germans and Italians especially.
Even Porsches don’t look good anymore outside of the sports cars. My neighbor just got a Macan EV and it’s a fucking mess. It looks like a giant rolling egg.
And the only reason their sports cars look good is because they just keep refreshing the same basic design(s).
And the gorgeous 718 is now dead with no replacement in sight
The front reminds me of the new Jaguar concept. Maybe that IS how cars are going to look in the next few years.
My thought exactly, these take years, two design teams from competing car companies in two different countries somehow came up with very similar things. I suspect the Audi has been around slightly longer, it looks more finished than the Jag but it might be because VW is a lot bigger than JLR.
There was another recent car/concept that looked a bit like the same design language but I can’t recall whose it was. Might have been an SUV.
It might be less of a coincidence than I thought, I have discovered that last summer Audi gained ex JLR designer Massimo Frascella as its new chief creative officer.
Jesus this thing is awful. I’m one of the rare freaks who appreciates brutalist architecture, but I have yet to see evidence that those themes work with automotive design. This is basically the Temu version of the Jaguar abomination…and oh great! We’ve got no rear windows at all.
Everyone wants tech for the sake of tech these days, right? Who needs to see out the back of their car when there are cameras and ridiculously complex electronic systems that definitely won’t go wrong? And this is almost certainly an EV, which is absolutely not what Audi needs.
Their EVs are completely devoid of character and have been a massive flop, but of course, rather than admit it they’re wrong they’re just going to keep shoving them down our throats. If they wanted to drum up enthusiasm for this they needed it to have a combustion engine IMO. I have no idea why I expect anything of Audi anymore, they’re a dead company walking.
Give us the 5 cylinder Golf R already.
IDK, I’m digging it. I don’t think it’s the greatest looking car in the world, but I think it’s good. It just feels Audi to me. Lots of brushed metal, relatively simple shapes, smooth features, not tons of crazy lines,etc; it just feels very Audi from like 20ish years ago when Audi was approaching their peak. It just gives me a “hey, Audi might be back” type vibe.
That’s clearly a retractable hardtop targa.
Which would be very neat if it made it to production.
More German complexity for the sake of complexity.
It feels as if Audi had filched the “designer” of the upcoming Jaguar.
The original TT was a bit of a shock, but people warmed to it. Later redesigns took away some of its flair, losing a lot of the Schuco-toy form.
If it reaches production, Audi needs to do a lot of reworking, lest people mistake it — at least from the front — as some strange new Toyota.
Dang. Best me to it. Jaguar without the teletubbies
Isn’t that a Jaguar?
I just can’t wait for this alien life form to attempt mating either the rear bumper of my car