Audi Quattro concept set for the road

Audi's stunning Paris coupe concept looks likely to hit the road – and soon…

Audi says building its stunning Quattro concept car from the Paris Motor could add an exotic edge to its sportscar line-up.

The chunky, turbocharged, five-cylinder coupe polarized opinions in Paris, with its clear A5 waistline and huge, open grille area mixing unhappily in some eyes. But design chief Wolfgang Egger’s styling isn’t the biggest source of controversy.

While actually building the Quattro might not be a technical issue (the showcar is a full ‘runner’), it seems that agreeing on how many to build might be. While Quattro GmbH head, Stephan Reil, claimed it would only go into production as an exotic, limited-run Audi, VW Group boss, Dr Martin Winterkorn, thought Audi might build 35,000 per year.

“This car is more than pure fantasy. We have started looking and we are rethinking standard processes to make it possible, but we haven’t decided yet,” Reil insisted.

“There are two important considerations: we need feedback to see who wants it; and we have to make it a business case to see if it’s possible to have low volume small series exotic cars like this.

“This is a unique situation and a halo car, even if we have no history in limited runs of 250 to 500 cars,” Reil insisted.

“This car and Lamborghini and the R8 will fit in the same corner and the role of it is pretty much the same,” he said.

While Reil’s figures are less than two percent of his boss’ hoped-for production numbers, it should be remembered that any production car would almost certainly be built on the Quattro GmbH production lines.

With the current TT running at around 50-55,000 cars a year, Winterkorn’s target number for the Quattro would see it squeezing into the razor-tight gap between the TT and the S/RS5. That’s one of the key reasons why Reil sees its future as a higher-performance, low-volume special.

But, with 150mm removed from the A5’s wheelbase and a body 40mm lower in overall height, higher production volumes are technically feasible, even if Reil would prefer to use the car as a showcase.

“It won’t cost €100,000, but it must be somewhere between the RS5 and the R8. This car will stand purely in the exotic corner if we do build it,” Reil insisted.

That would mean filling the Quattro with more power and pulling out weight to justify its high price — given the RS5’s burbling V8 pumps out 331kW and is, after all, a long-wheelbase version of the Quattro concept.

Reil hinted that any performance shortfall would be addressed with a combination of power increases to the five-cylinder 2.5-litre engine and substantial weight reductions.

“Right now, it’s 250kW. For a turbocharged road car there is a number that says you’re doing a really good job, and that’s around 140hp/litre… That’s the turbo equivalent of 100hp/litre and that’s quite a good engine.

“With the TTRS, we are just a little under it. It has 330 horsepower at the moment, but with 350 we would be there.

“By bringing in a larger turbo we could have more power by sacrificing some low-end torque. But the peak torque on the TTRS is at 1800rpm, so that’s not going to be a problem anyway.”

As for weight, Reil envisages a chassis and body made from a mixture of carbon-fibre and aluminium to demonstrate how Quattro could build its future top-end cars.

“An inline car based on this Quattro concept is not impossible to build and it shows all the new materials and carbon fibre mixed with aluminium as a way we can build cars.

“We know how to engineer it for production already. We are focusing on the technology to find the processes that can bring it to a business case,” Reil stated.