Look beyond the chunky wheels and tyres, jacked-up ride height, rubberised lower areas and ‘active back’ (we’ll get to that in a minute), this is probably the closest of the Spheres to a preview of a production car of the future. Riding on the incoming PPE modular architecture that’s set to underpin the next Porsche Macan and Audi A6, this could well be a read-between-the-lines preview of what the next Audi A7 will look like.
Anyway, what makes this thing ‘Active’, anyway? Those 22-inch wheels and knobbly thick-walled off-road tyres are a good start, as are the poke-out rubber arches and checkered rubbered lower area with which to bounce off road faces. Perhaps the star of the show is, as mentioned, the ‘Active Back’, which is a downhill biker’s delight. That’s because where you’ll find the lifting hatchback on an Audi A7, on the Activesphere, you’ll find a sliding panel that can reveal a load area good for two e-bikes – for if that last-mile journey happens to be to the mouth of a volcano – a decent haul of firewood or anything else you care to chuck in. Closed up, the Activesphere has a tapered tail that’s slipperier even than the A7 and Audi E-Tron GT.
These Sphere concepts are, however, very much focused on interior design and autonomous driving and are often studies in how the cabins of future Audis can evolve as the act of driving takes more and more of a back seat. In this case, they’ve gone for ‘functional minimalism’, the two-tone orange and black colourway on the individual seats is pretty out there, as the suicide doors flare to greet occupants. Per the other concepts, this one is also able to retract its driver controls including the wheel and pedals, when the level four autonomous driving capability takes over, turning the cabin into a lounge space of sorts.
