FRANKFURT MOTOR SHOW: Audi reveals Aicon concept

Audi is out to prove you can ditch almost everything that has made cars cars for the last 140 years and still star at Europe’s biggest motor show.

Led by its strange name, the Audi Aicon is a pure Level 5 autonomous electric concept car with four seats, four doors and no driver.

It might have just put its Level 3 Audi A8 limousine into production, but Audi wants to show it isn’t resting on its laurels with the Aicon geared up to cover between 700km and 800km on a single charge of its enormously capacious solid-state battery pack.

The Aicon is officially a technology and design study, not headed for production, but it is meant to demonstrate Audi’s ideas of how door-to-door full autonomy could retain the Ingolstadt brand’s signatures.

It’s a Quattro in more ways than one, too, with not just four-wheel drive, but four electric motors, one for each wheel, delivering 260kW of power and 550Nm of instant torque.

The layout gives the Aicon tremendous flexibility in its power delivery and finite power in every situation – though how many people will want their driving computer to fling them around corners at 1g is anybody’s guess and not something even Audi has much data on.

Instead, they’ll use its powertrain trickery to maximize the car’s ability get itself out of troubled situations where the grip is low or changeable.

The Aicon also anticipates a time of barely used brake discs, too. Full electric Level 4 and Level 5 cars will do most of their braking via their energy-regenerating electric motors, so Audi made the discs and calipers smaller and moved them inboard to minimize unsprung weight and maximize ride comfort. Well, you need to do something to smooth out the ride when the car rides on 26-inch wheels and tyres.

Thanks in part to its 800-volt electrical system, the Aicon can be topped up to an 80-per cent charge in less than 30 minutes, even as it does it inductively, with no cables and no dirty hands.

It runs basically the same axle and drive unit at each end and eliminates the last mechanical links in the steering, preferring to do the job electronically with the kind of four-wheel steering the production-car world has never seen before.

The Aicon sits on a purpose-built chassis that frees up passenger-compartment space with a 3.47-metre long wheelbase, yet its turning circle is only 8.5 metres across, meaning it easily turns inside the smallest Audi production car today.

It’s still a big car, at 5444mm long and with a wheelbase 240mm longer than the upcoming Audi A8 limousine. It’s also 2.1 metres wide, but only 1506mm high

It rides on air springs and damper units which use road-sensing cameras and individual electronic actuators to smooth out any road bumps or the body movement that comes from braking, accelerating and cornering.

The entire car is based around its cabin, rather than its bonnet or boot, but it retains distinct haunches and internal combustion-style power plays all over its surfacing, right down to the convex side windows and the edged D-pillar.

Up front, the Aicon dispenses with the mega-expensive laser headlights Audi has spent so much time and money developing over the last seven years, largely because the car sees perfectly well with its combination of radar, lidar and thermal-imaging cameras. Rear lights are a thing of the past, too.

Instead, it trips the light fantastic with 600 3D triangular pixels arranged in its grille area, giving it the ability to put on a show with animations, graphics or even information for pedestrians and other people outside the car.

The car is even designed to make “eye contact” with pedestrians and follow them as they walk past the car’s nose and when it’s time to get out of the car, it sends up a small drone with a flashlight to guide the way at night.

Inside, the Aicon has a bench rear seat integrated into its rear bulkhead and individual front seats that slide up to 500mm and can swivel 15 degrees to allow easier conversations with the rear-seat passengers, while retaining 660 litres of luggage space.

It will also be fully connected with both roadside infrastructure and other cars, with Audi insisting that will make the car crash-proof.