Audi's TT concept dilemma

Audi’s two different TT concept cars have wowed motor show fans this year, and now they’ve given Audi a serious problem.

Sources at Audi senior management insist that one of them will make it into production by late 2016 or early 2017, but not both. The trouble is, Audi has yet to decide which one joins its run-on team and which one sits on the bench.

Development director Dr Ulrich Hackenberg is said to personally favour the design statement of the red four-door coupe, but appears ready to cede to the numbers from the design and marketing departments, which are pushing hard for the TT Offroad concept.

They’ve had more time to get used to the TT Offroad concept, which made its debut at the Beijing motor show in April, while the sleeker TT Sportback only arrived at the Paris show in October. The 2014 Detroit show’s TT Shooting Brake concept has no feasible production future, sources say.

We managed some limited time at the wheel of both cars in southern France last week and it’s easy to see why Audi’s struggling to decide between the car it should put into production and the car it desperately wants to put into production.

On one hand, the booming small SUV market is crying out for something sexier than the just-facelifted Q3, while the TT Sportback brings a design edge and fits logically at the bottom end of an Audi 'Sportback' family that contains the A3, A5 and A7.

There is a strong push, too, to hasten both concepts into production to create a three-model TT family, but the economics don’t measure up to the emotions, according to Dr Hackenberg.

Both cars are striking in outdoor light – far more so than under the harsh light of a motor show stand. The TT Offroad concept looks far sleeker in the open air than it did on the stand in Beijing, while the TT Sportback is the most stunningly proportioned small car Audi has ever built.

Both are designed off the Modular Transverse Matrix (MQB), both could easily be built on any of its production lines without interrupting the normal flow of A3s and Golfs, and both share the same 2.63-metre wheelbase (about 12cm longer than the one under the TT Coupe).

The TT Offroad concept looks lower and sleeker out in the world than it does in either a studio or a motor show stand. Even seeing it move in the daylight, splashing through puddles on the French coast, makes you aware that there’s more to the design than anybody initially thought.

It’s clearly a part of the TT family and looks less cynical than we originally thought. It just fits. It’s also a lot more horizontal than we had once guessed, with the grille’s corners widened and the tail filled with TT Coupe curves and textures and horizontal lines that make it look wider than it really is.

At 1.53 metres, it’s a full 8cm lower than the Audi Q3 five-door, but almost 18cm higher than the TT Coupe. It’s a fraction wider, too, but is, surprisingly, just 21cm longer. It’s actually shorter than the TT Sportback by 8cm, though the sleek TT Sportback looks about half a metre longer. It rides on outrageous 255/40 R21 rubber, too.

Its interior shares a lot with the TT Coupe, though, which is where Audi would hope to amortize some production costs. It has a very useful back seat, complete with touch-screen tablets that double as movie screens attached to the back of the front seats.

It shares the same ground-breaking instrument cluster as the existing TT, along with the same vents and pedals, though its seats are new. There is also a very useful luggage area, with a false floor, tie-down hooks and the ability to fold the rear seats flat.

Then there’s the TT Sportback, which sports devilish details at the rear-end, a long, glass liftback that glides into a tiny bootlid and some wickedly horizontal new LED tail-lights.

The front half of its cabin is more or less identical to the TT Coupe, even if the bodyshell looks an awful lot longer. It is, actually, an awful lot longer, with an extra 29cm of length -- almost half of which is in the wheelbase, with the rest built into the rear overhang.

Like the TT Offroad, its two-pew rear seat is useful, though it’s difficult to get into and out of it without smacking your head on the roof rail. Still, that hasn’t hurt the Mercedes-Benz CLA yet…

It has Laser Lights up front, backing up the LED headlights with longer beams, and rides on monster 21-inch wheels wrapped in 255/30 R21 tyres.

Yet they are very different cars to answer very different questions. The TT Offroad concept could well be the answer to a fairly major problem that nobody at Audi likes to talk about: it doesn’t own the rights to the 'Q2', 'Q4' or 'Q6' nameplates. The Chinese car-maker Qoros does.

A production version of the TT Offroad concept would, sources say, become the de facto 'Q2' or 'Q4', while a high-rise version of the A5 Sportback will eventually take care of 'Q6' duties. There are also plans for a sleeker SUV to become the Q8, which will alleviate some of the aesthetic pressure off the upcoming Q7, whose looks are already said to be unloved within senior Audi circles.

Audi is already testing the TT Offroad concept in clinics alongside the TT Sportback, though Dr Hackenberg told motoring.com.au at the recent Los Angeles motor show that the Offroad was the most likely TT concept to convert into a production car.

“They are all under analysis in clinics, even the Shooting Brake,” Dr Hackenberg said. “They have shown a strong tendency for SUVs, so if we were to start with just one I’d say there is the strongest chance for the SUV version.”

“The TT Offroad concept provides a glimpse of how we might imagine a new model in the future TT family. It will be the peak sporting SUV in its class,” he admitted at its launch in Beijing.

Yet he still has a soft spot for the TT Sportback, especially in light of whispers that Dr Hackenberg and Audi’s new design head, Marc Lichte, are less than ebullient about next year’s crop of all-new Audis, including the Q7, the A4 sedan and Avant, the A5 and the R8.

“We have our sporty and elegant five-door A5 Sportback and A7 Sportback and now we are fusing both concepts to form a new member of a potential TT family,” he said at its launch.

Even if both cars were to navigate their ways through the Audi and Volkswagen Group financial mazes and into production, they would be unlikely to get there with their current powertrains.

While the TT Sportback is a powerful, all-wheel drive four-cylinder petrol machine, the TT Offroad runs a plug-in hybrid powertrain boasting two electric motors, 300kW of system power and an NEDC economy figure of just 1.9L/100km.

Still capable of sprinting to 100km/h in only 5.2 seconds, the TT Offroad joins a 215kW/380Nm version of the EA888 2.0-litre turbo-petrol four-cylinder engine with a 40kW/220Nm electric motor mounted inside the six-speed dual-clutch transmission. These two act in concert to both drive the front wheels and to harvest energy from them, but have no traditional mechanical linkage to the rear axle.

Instead, the rear-axle duties are taken care of by an 85kW/270Nm electric motor, drawing its energy from a 12kW/h lithium-ion battery mounted under the boot floor. It only really comes in when the driver wants more performance or the car decides things are too slippery and it needs quattro all-wheel drive.

The car has Audi’s now-standard 50km of electric range when fully charged (driving mostly through the rear wheels) and a fuel range of almost 900km.

It also introduces Audi’s idea of wireless charging, with the ability to send 3.3kW across an airgap and into the car’s own coil for charging efficiency of more than 90 per cent.

The TT Sportback, on the other hand, is a purely petrol-powered machine, with the 2.0-litre TFSI motor stretched out to 294kW of power and 450Nm of torque.

It runs a Haldex 5 all-wheel drive system and a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission to hurl itself to 100km/h in 3.9 seconds – or just shy of a V10 R8.

It’s not so economical, with 7L/100km, though it’s not bad for this level of performance.

Not that we had the chance to try either car to that level. Rainy weather meant the concept cars’ minders didn’t want them to come out to play at all. It was only wrangling and haggling and a brief burst of sunshine that brought them out of their trailers at all.

We were restricted to doing laps of the Cannes helicopter landing pad, but that was enough to know that the TT Sportback left bruises on the side of your head when you got into the back seat and a smile on your face when you got into the front seat.

It sounds a lot louder than the (admittedly production and street-legal) Coupe, even at the just-over-idle engine revs (not quite near the 7200rpm rev-limiter) we were allowed to use.

But that’s about all I can tell you. And I can’t tell you much more about the TT Offroad, except that it has plenty of headroom in both rows for tall people and feels more airy and spacious than it probably has a right to.

Its steering wheel is a bit different to the standard TT Coupe version, with an unmistakable red button to turn the car on and another button for the left hand to boost the car to maximum attack, with all three powerplants operating in unison.

It’s quick (for driving in a circle) without the button and considerably quicker when you push its boost button. Aside from that, it also introduces two pieces of software that are about to make their production debuts in the Q7 and the A4.

The first is an intersection assistant, which warns about errant cross traffic and the second is even cleverer. First seen in A3 e-tron prototypes, it talks to a city’s central traffic control centre to recommend the speed you should drive at to maximise your chances of getting green lights all day.