At Auto Shanghai, which opened its doors on April 19, the Audi A6 e-Tron concept greets visitors in Chinese. Three small, high-resolution LED projectors on each side of the chassis project Chinese characters and turn the floor around the electric show car into a stage. Sascha Heyde is one of the designers of the show car that is building excitement for the future car series. The Audi A6 e-Tron concept is making its debut at the Auto Shanghai 2021 auto exhibition as a precursor to new fully electric vehicles. Sascha Heyde is the designer of the show car, which consistently pushes Audi’s design vocabulary forward.
They benefit too. The extremely narrowly designed digital matrix LED headlights to operate like projectors. If, for example, the Audi A6 e-Tron concept is parked in front of a wall during a break to recharge the battery, drivers and passengers can pass the time playing a video game projected onto it. For Audi, the combination of safety features and aesthetic design is particularly important. That’s why the small, high-resolution projectors also display warning symbols on the street – to warn bicyclists that the car door is about to open. Four more LED projectors that Aud had inconspicuously integrated into the corners of the vehicle make blinker projections on the road.
The first major challenge was accommodating that big battery to be able to design an elegant, sporty car on that basis. That means we can implement a wide array of different vehicle concepts, meaning cars with high ground clearance like SUVs and CUVs, but also synthesize vehicles with flat architecture like the Audi A6 e-Tron concept without needing to interfere with the basic architecture. With the Audi A6 e-Tron concept, we were able to design a long wheelbase. Audi created a great deal of space between the axes, which Audi was able to use to position the battery. So with the battery, The company is working with length and width, not height. That, in turn, makes a flat silhouette possible. And that’s exactly what we wanted.
Does that mean that Audi customers don’t have to give up the classic shape of a limousine or a Sportback? It means that specifically where cars with electric engines are concerned, is it particularly important to us to be able to also retain the classic proportions, among other things. The company wants to build highly emotional and highly efficient automobiles with beautiful lines, but that doesn’t necessarily need to look different. Right in the C-pillar we still want to use the classical, elegant Audi proportions. So the Audi A6 e-Tron concept represents more of a soft transition where Audi’s traditional lines and proportions also have their place.
With its sporty proportions and elegant lines, including the fastback design typical of the brand, one look and you can see that this vehicle was conceived in a wind tunnel. Its cW value of just 0.22 is hard to beat in the electrified C-segment. In layman’s terms, this means the car exhibits minimal aerodynamic drag – which initially translates into lower energy consumption and therefore extended range. At the same time, the fine-tuning in the wind tunnel has once again resulted in an organic design with exceptional elegance and harmony down to the last detail. Looking at the front, it is immediately apparent that the Audi A6 e-tron concept is a fully electric-powered representative of the brand. A characteristic feature is the large enclosed – we designers say “inverted” – Singleframe grille.
