Audi Prologue concept 2015 Review

Audi’s development hard man, Dr Ulrich Hackenberg, isn’t a fan of radical concept cars. They have to do a job, he insists, and that job is to be a real car to usher in step changes in design or technology so they seem progressive and logical by the time they reach production.

At least, that’s his spin on the LA Auto Show-stealing prologue concept... So, it made sense that we took it for a drive in Los Angeles to measure just how “real” a car it is.

This is the car that marks the end of the Wolfgang Egger school of design at Audi and the beginning of the Marc Lichte era. This car will lend broad swathes of its edges and curves and proportions to the three biggest passenger cars in the Audi family, starting with the 2016 A8.

This all began with some badgering of Audi’s design team and Dr Hackenberg himself as far back as the Geneva Motor Show and culminating in an enthusiastic phone call just a week before the LA show. Yes, Audi confirmed, we can do it.

Which is how we came to be spending an extra two days in the SLS hotel in Beverley Hills, Audi’s base station for the world’s one and only prologue, pulled off the motor show stand for the first public days and, instead, made very public indeed.

Mind you, this is clearly more of a photography session than anything else. The 5.1 metre car is limited to 80km/h and the highly strung 4.0-litre V8 is, its minders say, behaving with "particular precociousness".

It’s a more coherent looking car in the sunlight of Los Angeles than it is in the spotlights of a motor show hall, with the sun soaking deep into its one-off part-pearl silver paint and, in Audi fashion, being reflected back in precisely the way Lichte’s team want it.

There are hips now... Big, curved top hips that take the shapes hinted at in the A5 coupe and exaggerate them, giving shape to rear ends that were once clean and chunked. There are very short overhangs and a low nose, with Matrix Laser headlights, that can’t possibly make it into production, or can it?

Dr Hackenberg says Audi has patented a new spring-loaded safety system to push the bonnet away from the engine block to pass pedestrian impact laws, so it might just be able to get the low nose into production.

The car itself is not the next anything, at least not underneath. This is a concept, so it conceptually sits on the next A8’s aluminium architecture. In reality, concept cars usually sit on whatever was convenient and delivered vaguely the right dimensions to carry the body panels. This time that's the standard, short wheelbase A8 spaceframe aluminium chassis, but with 50mm cut out of the wheelbase. It’s also had its front subframe lowered to allow the new nose job.

On the new-stuff side, it does actually carry the next A8’s five-link rear suspension with its trick rear-wheel steering. While Audi isn’t talking about how they’ve done it, they’ve mastered the engineering that has hampered efforts to match four-wheel steering with its torsen (torque sensing) mechanical quattro all-wheel drive systems.

The system gives five degrees of rear steering in the prologue and it’s expected to be about the same in the A8, which will help it turn and park like an A3.

You don’t approach the prologue like a normal car, though. You simply stop involuntarily and stare at it for a couple of seconds before your body prescribes an arc away from where you need to go, just to see it from different angles.

There are, despite Marc Lichte’s impassioned denials, hints of other cars in there. The rear window looks a bit Citroen C6. The chamfered tail has some essences from Saab and even the Mercedes-Benz S-Class Coupe. The rest of it, though, is Audi’s alone.

And then you try to get into it, but it doesn’t have any door handles. Instead it just has a button near the base of the frameless front windows. The doors are enormous, but so beautifully balanced that they swing open with the touch of a finger.

While it’s the nose that draws the immediate attention, with its wide, low single-frame grille, its shallow lights and crisply creased bonnet, it’s the interior that brings the technology jumps.

The undoubted technology leader in the entire car is the bendable Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) screen, one of just 11 in the world at the time of writing, and that includes the prototypes inside Samsung’s R&D department. It’s just 4mm thick and lays flat against the centre console, ahead of the thick gear lever, until the engine is switched on, when it bends up freakily so you can see it without glare, then bends back down flat again when the engine switches off.

What the actual benefit of that is compared to a bottom-hinged flat screen might be up for debate, but Audi just wants everybody to know it’s on top of digital display technologies. It’s highly unlikely to have passed through the Volkswagen Group’s validation tests by the time the A8 reaches production, but it’s a very cool piece of kit.

Here the screen takes care of the climate control (which wasn’t actually working on the concept car) and the hand-writing jobs, plus a scattering of other car setup options. For the rest, there are three touch screen panels across the dash, which is unusually straight and simple. It’s also quite short by modern Audi standards, with the only real curvature coming from the slightly higher tier that wraps around the top of the dash and the bottom of the windscreen.

The passenger gets a screen to call their very own and can do things like input the navigation data and then 'swipe' it across to the driver’s screen.

Then there’s the three-dimensional, full colour instrument cluster, which sounds fanciful and a waste of time when you read it, but clearly marks a new step forward for Audi and is equally clearly headed for production very soon.

It works a treat, giving a depth to the screen that seems to push back at least 10cm into the car, with the different distances and depths indicating the differing priorities for everything you can see. Fuel is a low priority, speed is a higher priority, navigation gets bigger as corners come closer and any warnings get big and close, fast.

It is, simply, the most advanced displays of displays the car industry has ever seen, but it doesn’t stop there.

prologue also has a “Butler”, which is what Audi calls its intelligent cabin software program and can identify passengers and drivers from their phones. It can make suggestions for music or routes based on the driver’s normal preferences, too. Then there’s a development of Audi’s phone box, dubbed Easy Slot, beneath the centre console lids and it can not just charge them, but network all of the smartphones in the car to the infotainment system.

At the touch of a button, the V8 bellows to life in a way that suggests why Audi launched the concept in America. It sounds like a fat-piped hot rod, not a high-tech, twin-turbo German V8 complete with cylinder deactivation.

It’s a raucous thing, with fat, rich tones that carry more hints of Lamborghini and the R8 V10 than they do of the RS6 and RS7 that share this powerplant. That’s down to a new exhaust system that Dr Hackenberg insists is fully legal and compliant with Euro 6, but still delivers 445kW -- more than 600 horsepower in the old measurements.

The core mechanical parts are more familiar, though, with the V8 pumping out 750Nm and the all-wheel drive capable of hammering to 100km/h in a supercar-threatening 3.7sec... If the car wasn't limited to 80km/h, that is...

The big concept is not light, though, at 1980kg, but still claims an NEDC figure of 8.6L/100km and emits 199 grams/km.

prologue isn’t just a style and design leader for future Audis, though, because it also ushers in Audi’s upcoming 42-volt electrical system, which will be seen in a production Audi within two years. The system runs all the on-board electronics and is powered by a belt-driven starter motor. Audi insists it can regenerate up to 12kW under braking.

It’s a doddle to drive at low speeds, even if the minders are paranoid about scraping that new nose on the hotel’s exit gutter. The police escorts, front and rear, know all about the prologue’s pace potential and prefer to keep it at the lower end of its range.

Still, it’s not a bad idea to start slowly in a concept car like this one. The body is surprisingly tight, with none of the creaking and moaning over impacts that you usually find. Its seats are comfortable, the driving position is good and straight, the steering wheel is near vertical and is sculpted and crafted to near art-gallery standards.

In full Beverley Hills paparazzi mode, the prologue has two photography cars and a drone chasing it most of the way, but mostly it’s the people on the street who stop and stare at this car.

Even if they don’t see it coming, they hear it coming. That V8 is smooth and deep and rich, but it’s not quiet. It’s the opposite of quiet, thundering off the streetscape even at 2000rpm and more than enough to turn heads, even in car blasé LA.

Turning heads through noise here is one thing. Keeping the heads looking at you is far more difficult, but the prologue swivels necks and locks them in, with most people curious at first and then watching intently.

Not that it’s a perfect runner. The engine is coughing and spluttering and threatening to stall at low speeds, demanding a few throttle pumps to keep it from dying completely every time it coughs. But it hammers.

We only got a scant few chances to crank it, even from low speeds, and it’s epically quick to hit its limiter at 80km/h. Sadly.

Limiter. Bah! But that noise is just amplified and gets richer with throttle loads, so that’s something, if only briefly...

It actually rides quite well, even on its 22-inch wheels, mostly due to its adaptive air suspension.

As a drive, it’s frustratingly brief, but memorable. As a concept, its effects will linger for years…

2015 Audi Prologue pricing and specifications:
Price: You wish
Engine: 4.0-litre, petrol, biturbo V8
Output: 445kW/750Nm
Transmission: eight-speed automatic
Fuel: 8.6L/100km
CO2: 199g/km
Safety Rating: TBA