Audi has rebuilt its flagship from the ground up. The fourth-generation A8 arrives with a new design language, an operating concept that throws out the old rotary controller, and an electrified drive across the range. It is also the first production car in the world developed for highly automated driving. From 2018, Audi will introduce piloted functions such as the parking pilot, garage pilot and traffic jam pilot step by step.
The new A8 is meant to set the tone for the whole brand, and the proportions do the talking. The Singleframe grille is wide and upright, the body is muscular above the arches, and the shape leans on the Audi prologue study from a few years back. There is a standard car at 5.17 metres and the A8 L, whose wheelbase stretches another 13 centimetres. Both put all four wheels on equal display, a nod to quattro and the permanent all-wheel drive that has been part of Audi’s identity for decades. Viewed side-on, the upright nose and the gently sloped tail create tension. At night, HD Matrix LED headlights with laser lighting and an OLED tail light strip handle the theatre, running animated sequences as the driver walks up or leaves.
Inside, the brief was a lounge rather than a cockpit. The A8 has grown in length in both body styles, and the materials read bespoke: perforated upholstery, air vents with electrically driven shutters, open-pored wood that feels natural to the touch. Audi skips chrome tanning for its leathers, which are tanned with plant-based products, and wraps the comfort head restraints in a soft Cocoon leather. There are eight material and colour schemes, ending with Audi design selection, plus Verdi cloth and the Valetta, Valcona and Unicum leather grades in new colours such as pearl beige, metropolis gray and merino gray.
The best seat in the car is the rear right. The optional relaxation seat in the A8 L offers four adjustment options and a footrest, and the passenger can warm and massage their soles on a unit built into the back of the front passenger seat. New comfort head restraints finish the job. Rear passengers get their own control unit, the rear seat remote, a removable OLED device the size of a smartphone, for ambient lighting, Matrix LED reading lights, massage and private calls.
Audi has done away with the rotary pushbutton and touchpad of the outgoing car, and the dashboard is kept almost button-free. At its centre sits a 10.1-inch touchscreen that vanishes into a gloss black panel when switched off; a second 8.6-inch display on the centre tunnel runs climate and comfort, and doubles as a text input surface. You rest your wrist on the selector lever and get a click, both acoustic and tactile, for every press. Swiping works as it does on a phone. Voice control is the third layer and pulls answers from on board or from the cloud at LTE speed. The navigation learns from the routes you drive and builds detailed 3D models of major European cities. Underneath it all is the MIB 2+ platform with an NVIDIA K1 processor; the virtual cockpit renders at 1,920 x 720 pixels.
The headline claim is that this is the first production automobile developed specifically for Level 3 automated driving. The Audi AI traffic jam pilot takes over in slow traffic at up to 60 km/h on freeways and highways where a physical barrier separates the two carriageways. Press the AI button on the centre console and the car handles acceleration, steering and braking, so the driver can take their hands off the wheel until the system asks for them back. A central driver assistance controller, the zFAS, builds a picture of the surroundings from radar, a front camera, ultrasonic sensors and, a first for a carmaker, a laser scanner. That first comes with a caveat. The statutory framework still has to be clarified country by country and approval procedures take time, so Audi will introduce the system into production step by step.
The chassis is where Audi has thrown the most at the car. Dynamic all-wheel steering is a world first in this class: the front ratio varies with speed while the rear wheels turn with or against the steering depending on how fast you are going. At low speed it cuts the turning circle by about a metre, to 11.4 metres in the A8 and 11.8 in the A8 L. Audi AI active suspension is fully active, with an electric actuator at each wheel able to raise or lower it individually. It draws from a 48-volt electrical system that Audi now fits as the primary system across every A8. Together with pre sense 360 degrees, the body is raised within half a second if a side impact is coming, presenting a more resistant section to the other car; Audi claims the loads on occupants can be cut by up to 50 percent.
At launch in Germany the A8 comes with two reworked V6 turbos: a 3.0 TDI making 210 kW (286 hp) and a 3.0 TFSI at 250 kW (340 hp). Other engines and a plug-in hybrid with inductive charging follow in 2018. Every engine runs a belt alternator starter as the hub of the 48-volt system, mild hybrid tech that lets the car coast with the engine off between 55 and 160 km/h for up to 40 seconds, restarts it smoothly, extends start/stop down to 22 km/h and recovers up to 12 kW under braking. Audi reckons the package trims as much as 0.7 litres per 100 km in real driving. Power goes through a new eight-speed tiptronic, which for the first time uses an electric oil pump while coasting, and quattro permanent all-wheel drive is standard, splitting torque 40:60 front to rear in normal conditions.
Twelve colours are on offer, including three new Audi finishes, Terra Gray, Vesuvius Gray and Seville Red, while Impala Beige and Navarra Blue appear on the A8 for the first time. The lighting deserves its own paragraph. The optional HD Matrix LED high beam uses 32 individually controlled LEDs per unit and blanks out other road users rather than dimming everything. Audi laser lighting joins it for the first time with HD Matrix LED high beams: the laser spot is marked by an X-shaped shutter, activates above 70 km/h and doubles high-beam range. Each headlight carries 138 LEDs and one laser diode. At the back, four ultra-flat OLEDs float in each module, two per side as tail lights and two as brake lights, with 135 LEDs at work in each rear light.
Then there is the sheer number of assistance systems, 41 of them, grouped into Park, City and Tour packages, with Tour standard in Germany. The AI assist package plus bundles all three and adds the remote garage pilot. Crossing assist, manoeuvring assist, curb warning, exit warning, cross traffic assist, pre sense 360 degrees, adaptive driving assistant with lane and traffic jam assist from 0 to 250 km/h, bottleneck assist, turn assist and collision avoidance assist with individual wheel braking all appear on the list. Park assist and night vision assist are standalone options. The parking and garage pilots let the driver stand outside the car, holding the AI button on the myAudi app while watching the 360-degree camera feed; the car steers itself in, then engages P and shuts down.
The A8 also joins the cloud properly. Car-to-X services share traffic sign and hazard information between Audis, drawing on HERE maps that Audi is building with BMW and Daimler. The Audi connect key turns a compatible Android phone into a key over NFC, shareable with four other people. Up to seven profiles and around 400 personalisable parameters let the car greet you by name on the virtual cockpit. In the back, two Audi tablets with 10.1-inch full HD screens handle Rear Seat Entertainment and talk to the MMI over the 5 GHz Wi-Fi band. The 3D Bang & Olufsen Advanced Sound System drives 23 speakers with 1,920 watts and, for the first time, brings height-information 3D sound to the rear seats using an algorithm developed with the Fraunhofer Institute.
The seats themselves are lighter than before. The front pair alone saves over four kilograms, and glass fibre-reinforced polymer appears in the rear. The top front seat is the comfort customized contour seat, with pneumatic bolster adjustment and optional heating and ventilation in three stages. The massage function now uses 16 small air pockets in each backrest, arranged in threes, working through seven programs and three intensity levels from a small compressor on each seat. Rear passengers can have heating, electrical fore/aft and backrest adjustment, and their own massage with 18 triple air pockets per seat.
Comfort runs deeper than the seats. The air quality package fragrances the cabin through the air conditioning outlets, from two vials in the instrument panel, with four intensity levels, and adds an ionizer that charges airborne molecules with negative ions so dust clumps and drops to the floor. A particulate sensor for specific markets was to follow the next year. The two-section panoramic sunroof opens up the A8 L’s interior, the boot holds 505 litres in both body styles, and the doors need only a five-millimetre pull on the handle for a microswitch to release the catch.
Phone handling gets the same treatment. Two mobiles can be paired and used alternately, and MMI navigation plus stores more than 4,000 contacts. For the rear, a separate Audi phone box pairs a smartphone wirelessly with the car aerial and charges it inductively to the Qi standard, and the rear seat remote lets a passenger make calls without broadcasting them to the whole cabin.
Underneath, the body follows the Audi Space Frame principle: 58 percent aluminium, a hot-formed steel cabin, a carbon-fibre rear panel and a magnesium strut-tower bar. Torsional rigidity improves by up to 24 percent over the predecessor. The first A8, back in 1994, was the first volume-built car with a unitary aluminium body, and Audi has built more than a million cars with the technology since. The new car keeps the aluminium ASF structure, with 14 joining techniques holding the multi-material body together.
Taken as a whole, the fourth-generation A8 is Audi making a specific argument: that the luxury sedan should lead on technology rather than follow. The traffic jam pilot, the laser scanner, the touchscreen cockpit and the 48-volt chassis all point the same way. Whether buyers were ready for a car that wants to drive itself in a jam was a question the next few years would answer.
Vehicle data
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Make | Audi |
| Model | A8 / A8 L (fourth generation) |
| Generation / chassis code | Fourth generation (D5) |
| Model year(s) covered | 2018 (on sale from 2018; revealed 2017) |
| Body style | Four-door luxury sedan (saloon); standard and long-wheelbase A8 L |
| Powertrain / engine | 3.0 TDI V6 turbo diesel; 3.0 TFSI V6 turbo petrol; plug-in hybrid to follow in 2018 |
| Power / torque | 3.0 TDI 210 kW (286 hp); 3.0 TFSI 250 kW (340 hp); torque not stated in sources |
| Transmission | Eight-speed tiptronic automatic |
| Drivetrain | quattro permanent all-wheel drive |
| Key performance figures | Coasting with engine off from 55 to 160 km/h for up to 40 s; energy recovery up to 12 kW; turning circle 11.4 m (A8) / 11.8 m (A8 L) |
| Price (as stated) | Not stated in sources |
| On-sale / announcement period | Revealed 2017; German market launch from 2018 |
| Market | Germany / Europe |