Audi’s Marc Lichte on the premium brand’s autonomous revolution

Audi wants the world to know it is getting deadly serious about making autonomous production cars a reality within three years. To do so, it will launch a trio of new concepts – the Sky Sphere at Pebble Beach, the Grand Sphere at IAA Munich in September, and the Urban Sphere rumoured to reveal in Beijing by early 2022.

“We are telling a story around the technology of autonomous driving in three acts,” Audi’s head of design Marc Lichte told Car Design News in an exclusive one-to-one chat. “This year and the beginning of next year we will present three show cars and at the core of each show car is Level 4 autonomous driving, but each car has a different focus. The Grand Sphere represents a very concrete teaser for a production model we will launch at the end of 2024. The revolution is that the Grand Sphere offers First Class travel in the first row, not the second, because ‘the driver’ is the Level 4 technology. The second row is more of a lounge. It’s a completely different layout to today’s cars.”

Lichte is also excited by the exterior proportions his team were able to achieve for the Grand Sphere, which occupies a space similar to current top-end limousines. “The footprint and height of the Grand Sphere is like that of an Audi A8 today, but it looks lower because of the very long wheelbase and bonnet, plus some tricky lines on the exterior which visually reduce the height even more. This autonomous car looks like a traditional Gran Turismo. I never did a car like this; it will be a revolution.”

There’s that ‘revolution’ word again, although Audi isn’t the first major carmaker to create an autonomous electric vehicle concept with a very long wheelbase to house a massive battery pack below and a huge cabin above – the 2015 Mercedes F 015 is an obvious forebear – and the Grand Sphere isn’t even the first Audi to envisage the idea; that accolade goes to the 2017 Aicon concept. But what Lichte does think is revolutionary, is the packaging of such a vehicle in a GT shape and being so close to production-ready, unlike say the 2019 Bentley EXP 100 GT concept which was also a GT but envisaged as a production car for circa 2035.

Students and historians of bold car company statements on imminent road-ready autonomous vehicles over the last decade will be aware of the numerous ‘false dawns’ around this technology though. Sometimes this has been because of slower than expected global legislation changes, but at other times the fall-out from high-profile street trial fatalities and customers of lower-level autonomous cars stretching their tech’s limits with catastrophic results, have also made carmakers slam on the brakes of their autonomous programmes.

So, what convinces Lichte that now is the right time to show this sort of vehicle? “If you look at the history of Audi, it became very successful in the last 50 years by making big steps through good decisions, like Audi Sport, Quattro, aerodynamics and space frame technology,” he says. “And I’m 100% sure that now is the right time to make the next bold decision. We are developing a production car based on autonomous software at its heart and are 100% convinced it will be ready at the end of 2024 and at the beginning of 2025 you will be able to drive it, with Level 4 technology on-board. We want to be the first with a [production] interior designed around this technology. You could call the Grand Sphere a van, but it doesn’t look like a van. It’s very low. A van is not sexy and this car is really sexy.”