The high-performance sports car is one-of-a-kind and comprises a number of individually manufactured components
It is a functional, rectangular building with a gray facade - a hall like thousands of others in the industrial parks dotting our cities. The only sign of any significant activity is a lone Bavarian flag fluttering on a wooden balcony that seems a bit out of place. This seeming wasteland is in reality a place where the future of the automobile is quite literally being made. Things are much livelier inside the hall. Two designers and four modelers are working on a large block of brown industrial plasticine. The result of their handiwork is pioneering for the design of one of Germany's most successful carmakers. This is where the Audi e-tron Spyder, the latest show car from AUDI AG, is being created.
The faces are drawn with tension at this decisive moment. The modelers and designers are going through the data on screen together one more time. There is no time for lengthy consideration and discussions. Then the decisive click on the "Confirm" button. The mill mounted on two giant arms goes into motion. Fed with the vehicle data, the mill begins carving the designers' design out of the clay. For the next 18 hours, one layer after another is cut away until the first side of the car stretched over a frame of steel, wood and rigid foam stands on the floor of the hall in three dimensions and in full size.
The mill receives a new load of data for the second half of the model. The designers work on two different vehicle sides in this early form-finding phase, which allows alternatives to be compared directly and makes decisions easier. Frank Lamberty, a designer at Audi, uses dark adhesive tapes to check the contours of the model carved by the mill. He carefully works until arriving at the perfect line. Again and again he steps back to view his work from a distance and compares it with the cross-section of familiar production models. A show car should also bear the Audi signature. When describing the form-finding of the Audi e-tron Spyder, Lamberty says, "We were constantly bouncing between two worlds like a ping-pong ball. On the one side was the elegant shape of speedboats. On the other was the radical world of naked bikes (motorcycles without full or partial fairings) or roadsters from the 1960s and 1970s. The Audi e-tron Spyder is the result of this inspiring convergence process and unites these two worlds."
Three months before the start of the show, Lamberty and his team are working time-intensively on the clay model in the hall. That they are concentrating on the design of a show car is already a success in itself. To design a show car is the dream of many automobile designers and thus a coveted job. "The beauty of a show car is that the initial ideas are often implemented almost unchanged. We are largely free of technical constraints," says Wolfram Luchner, a designer at Audi who played a major role in the creation of the exterior of the Audi e-tron Spyder.
A multi-staged internal competition decided who got to design the car. 17 designers entered the competition. "The ideas developed were bold and free of constraints. Some of them were even radical. The broad scope of the designs shows the great potential of our designers," says Stefan Sielaff, Head of Audi Design. He initially chose four teams, who then had two weeks to flesh out their "directions," or initial designs. In the next step, two designers built their designs as 3D data models. For the final choice between the last two designs, the teams projected their computer data on the big screens in the design studio. What just a few weeks ago were the initial strokes on paper was now displayed on the walls as a three-dimensionally tangible show car.
A lot is at stake with the final decision. After all, the chosen design will be catching the eye of thousands of international visitors at the show in Paris.