Audi Activesphere takes the autonomous electric future off-road
For the first time, Audi has gathered its trio of Sphere concept cars in one place, that place being the sweet green lawns of the Monterey peninsula during Car Week. As much possibility as the Skysphere, Grandsphere, and Urbansphere promise, no vision from the birthplace of Quattro and a World Rally Championship car that changed the sport is complete without a serious off-road component. So coming in hot from the hills is the Activesphere concept, previewing ingolstadt’s battery-electric vision of “maximum variability for an active lifestyle on and off-road.” All we know about it is in that brief description and the teaser photo. A full reveal comes in early 2023.
Its Rally Fighter looks have us believe the Activesphere won’t be about taking it easy no matter whether the road is paved. The shape and hints of large, knobby tires give it enough aggression to justify the conceptual inclusion of the 120-kWh battery and dual-motor powertrain from the Grandsphere, which put out 700 horsepower and 708 pound-feet of torque for up to 466 miles on the WLTP cycle. While the other three concepts have talked up their restful interiors and autonomous capability, the Activesphere looks like the one we’d most want to drive. And who knows, Audi could announce off-road autonomous driving; can’t let Jaguar Land Rover have all-terrain autonomy to itself.
Speaking of gathering concepts, what we’d really like to see is Audi’s off-road flights of fancy over the last 10 years sharing the same piece of ground. That would be the 544-hp V10-diesel-powered Nanuk Quattro Concept from 2013, the 408-hp hybrid TT Offroad Concept from 2014, the battery-electric AI: Trail Quattro Concept from 2019 (pictured). The Trail Quattro Concept, in fact, might provide clues to what’s coming from the Activesphere. The 2019 show car was part of a quartet of electric vehicles under the AI banner, representing four use cases broken into the nearly the same mission statements as the four new Sphere cars. If you gave the Trail Quattro Concept a traditional coupe’s greenhouse and filled out the sheetmetal with proper fenders, the two could meet in the middle. Note the similar headlights as well. On the AI:Trail those weren’t fixed units, but five drones with lights on them that could fly in front of the vehicle to provide lighting further ahead and then dock on the roof rack for charging. We’d love to see that in the future.
