SHANGHAI MOTOR SHOW: Audi Prologue Allroad

Audi has turned its show-stopping Los Angeles motor show concept car into a full family with a high-riding Allroad version that will make its debut at next week’s Shanghai show.

While the LA show's huge two-door Prologue coupe concept marked the start of the Marc Lichte era of design at Audi and the Geneva show's Prologue Avant concept extended the family, Shanghai's Prologue Allroad is a clear guide to the future of the Allroad lines for the A4 and the A6, both of which are hugely popular, especially in Europe.

It’s another massive piece of machinery from Lichte’s design team, measuring fully 5.13 metres long, wearing five doors and putting the emphasis on the family.

And it’s clearly an emphasis on families that wants to go places in a hurry, because Audi has fitted it with 540kW worth of plug-in hybrid powertrain that obviously delivers enormous all-wheel drive performance, but in concert with low fuel consumption.

It uses the 4.0-litre TFSI biturbo petrol V8 as its basis, then mates it to an electric motor fitted inside the eight-speed automatic transmission to deliver a combined system torque output of 900Nm.

Audi claims the Prologue Allroad hits 100km/h in an R8 V10-beating 3.5 seconds, yet uses just 2.4L/100km on the NEDC plug-in hybrid fuel economy standard.

Audi mounts its 14.1kWh lithium-ion battery beneath the cargo floor, which gives the car an estimated 54km of silent, emission-free electric running. And, when it’s flat, you can recharge it wirelessly via the latest development of Audi’s inductive charging prototypes.

Both the front and rear wheels are controlled five-link suspension architectures, including adaptive air suspension damping, then it’s all stopped by carbon-ceramic brakes. The steering is a fuel-saving electro-mechanical unit, which also governs the rear-wheel steering.

But the Prologue Allroad is about design more than powertrain development, and it’s clearly part of a three-model prologue family, though it’s quite different to the others.

The coupe was obviously long and sleek, but the Prologue Allroad is fully 77mm higher than even the Prologue Avant.

It shares a similar look at the front with its siblings, complete with its prototype Matrix Laser headlights, with 420,000 pixels per light (the Matrix LED in the A8 has 24).

The roofline begins higher than the other prologues and quickly begins to taper down in an effort to emphasise its performance credentials. It also runs a set of aluminium-accented roof rails for practicality.

It keeps the signature flared wheel-arches, meant to be reminiscent of the ur quattro’s motorsport-oriented arches, and they house 22-inch show car wheels with five spokes each, and it retains the signature grey Allroad arch extensions, though they are far thinner than on current production Audis.

Audi has painted it in white (Dehua White, for the nerds), and it has no door handles because the surfaces of the window caps have door-lock sensors built into them.

The rear lights are LED, with three-dimensional sculpting giving them a depth and look from different angles that isn’t replicated in production cars yet.

There's also a light, clean interior, like in its stablemates. It’s less austere in its feel than the original coupe, though, with more sumptuous leather trim joining the aluminium and OLED surfaces.

The broad instrument panel highlights Audi’s future-tech digital layout, with three touch-surface control panels and information or choices can be swiped across from the passenger seat onto the driver’s instrument display or head-up display.

The centre console features a style study for Audi’s new gear lever for luxury cars, while the star of the show is the ultra-thin, bendable OLED screen for the climate-control, infotainment and texting inputs. It lays flat when the car is switched off, but bends up when needed so the driver can give inputs much like in a touch-screen smart phone.

The rear passengers get their own OLED screen on their own centre console to adjust their seats, climate-control and infotainment systems, and they can swap their data with the driver.