Photo credit: Audi, Wheelsage
What better invitation for a designer than to create a visionary interpretation of the car of a possible future? Walter de Silva, at the time Director of Design at Audi, took the opportunity to consider many stylistic features in preparation for future, real-world models, as peculiar characteristics of the car that the producer of the film “I, Robot” wanted in his movie, set in the Chicago cityscape in the year 2035.
The trapezoidal “Single-Frame Grille” immediately identifies the car as an Audi while the front and rear LED lights were a delightful anticipation of things to come. We are at the turn of the Millennium and for a car that in the film works without a driver – today it seems possible, back then it was a very bold move – de Silva “invented” a way to move the car in all directions.
A simple invention, the same one used by his office chair: he used spheres instead of conventional wheels. This idea gives the RSQ real character that combines these surprising spherical wheels with a line defined by perfectly polished surfaces that are immediately associated with Audi.
The interior was very far ahead of its time: the steering wheel was yoke shaped as many others are today, while all the driving information was displayed digitally via the instrument cluster by Audi’s Multi-Media Interface (MMI) unit. The butterfly doors open vertically and there is the inscription “RSQ” on the door sills, just like on the more recent Audi RS.
For the engine, he chose one from the family collection: the 5.0 V10 from the Lamborghini Gallardo, producing 610 horsepower. It would have been interesting to see how those spherical wheels behaved in an acceleration test!
