House of Progress offers peek at future of luxury
The Audi grandsphere concept car hints heavily at what tomorrow’s self-driving electric limousines will be like
WHAT’S remarkable about Audi’s House of Progress, a pop-up deep in the bowels of the ArtScience Museum, is not what you find inside, but what you don’t. The space does have six Audis in it, but notably absent are salesmen and the displays with pricing and technical data that usually stand alongside sleek new cars.
“This is not a sales event,” says Marc-Andreas Brinkmann, the director of experiential marketing for Audi. “It’s really about getting people in touch with the brand, with all the topics that we usually discuss, like design, performance, digitalisation and sustainability.”
Brinkmann admits that the House of Progress is ultimately about getting people interested in Audi as a brand, especially when they do shop for a new car someday, but he says its main purpose is to provide a backdrop for discussions about the topics above. For example, before the pop-up ends its run here on Apr 16, it will be the venue for the Festival of Creativity & Design by Semi Permanent, a design company.
Audi has taken the House of Progress to cities as diverse as Milan, Sao Paulo and Tokyo, but this is the pop-up’s first appearance in the region. “When we saw this concept, we thought: ‘Okay, there’s no better place in South-east Asia to bring House of Progress than Singapore’ – because it’s such a futuristic city,” Markus Schuster, the managing director of Audi Singapore, says.
While Audi is happy to leave the lofty conversations to others, the cars inside represent the brand’s ideas about the future of mobility. The R8 V10 Coupe, the only combustion model on display, does seem like an anachronistic choice, but it sits alongside the RS e-tron GT, as if handing over its high performance halo to the brand’s sleek electric four-door, now the most powerful Audi on sale.
Also, there are the Q4 e-tron and Q8 e-tron, a mid-sized and large electric sport utility vehicle respectively that the brand will launch here later this year. But a concept car called the grandsphere offers a peek at a more distant future.
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On the surface, the sleek limousine looks like something from a movie set, but while it isn’t destined for production, Jason Battersby, an exterior designer at Audi, says the grandsphere hints heavily at what luxury will look like when a car is both fully self-driving and purely electric.
Its cigar-shaped silhouette is a rejection of the three-box layout that evolved from a need for an engine compartment. The battery drive is more compact, which gives car designers the freedom to reimagine cars from the ground up.
“Being able to have an electric drivetrain really changed the architecture of the car,” Battersby says. “You have much more room to play with. For example, the bonnet on the grandsphere is a little bit lower than what you could normally do. You don’t have that massive engine underneath.”
Because the grandsphere can drive itself, its steering wheel and pedals tuck away when the vehicle is in autonomous mode, which helps create a lounge-like space in the car. It does without touchscreens to keep things zen-like. Instead, displays are projected onto the cabin panels.
“The interior (design) colleagues just did an amazing job of rethinking the interior of our next vehicles and really adapting the technologies and materials that we have, to have something completely clean,” Battersby says. “You know, as soon as the projection is off, you have just something that feels more like a living room.”
Cabin sensors track eye and hand movement, so users can operate the car simply by looking at various parts of the cabin and making the appropriate physical gestures or speaking the right commands. Those ideas are almost certainly production-bound, but some of the grandsphere’s design elements could make it into showroom models, too.
“I would say that, in general, just the idea to reduce the complexity and go back to a little bit of the sophistication and beauty that you can find in more soft surfacing is what is already being applied (to) the grandsphere. And that’s something that will hopefully trickle into the production cars,” Battersby adds.
That would delight Audi Singapore’s Markus Schuster. “I’m just amazed by the sleek lines. It just really breathes this dynamism,” he says, referring to the grandsphere. “And then when these huge doors open, and it opens up this lounge, that is really a ‘wow’ moment.”
One reason the grandsphere offers such a dramatic view of its interior is that its rear doors open backwards, instead of being hinged in front. That removed the need for a traditional central pillar, which in turn created a much larger opening for the cabin. Like the House of Progress it appears in, the grandsphere is remarkable for what’s not there.
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