Merc design boss: Audi Concept C interior “looks like it was designed in 1995”

Yesterday we asked what you thought of the new interiors previewed by Audi, BMW and Mercedes at the Munich motor show. And just for fun, we also put the very same question to Merc design chief Gorden Wagener, because why not fan the flames of competition between the German big three?

“I was working for the Volkswagen Group until 1997, then I went to Mercedes,” said Wagener as we fully expected him to decline to comment on a competitor’s product.

“That interior [of the Audi Concept C] looks like it was designed in 1995. It is a little bit too known, and there is too little tech. I have always claimed that I am a big fan of hyper-analogue things, but you cannot ignore a screen. When you have a small screen, you automatically send the message ‘congratulations, you are sitting in a small car’.”

Ouch. The knives are well and truly out.

“I mean this is a concept car,” continued Wagener. “And it's a niche car too, so even if they build it like this it doesn’t really matter. But for a mainstream solution, going back to all switches will not work.

“I believe that with large language models, we will see more voice operation. It is now working perfectly. I think that will be the future, but even so you want to have a visual reference on the screen, or you might want to watch a movie and stuff like that. So yeah, you need big screens.”

That certainly seems to be at odds with the general opinion of the Top Gear comments section. But what about his thoughts on the cabin of the Neue Klasse iX3?

“What the other manufacturer did? I mean, they showed the concept a couple of years ago with the information across the bottom of the windscreen. I have to say I'm not a big fan of that because it's so far away it’s hard to read. Everything will appear smaller so it’s distracting, and you need a device to operate it because it’s too far away to be touch-sensitive, so you have to put a touchscreen in there which they did. So it’s a pretty conventional solution, and actually a complicated one because you have information on different levels and I don't think that's intuitive.

“I mean, they think it’s progressive and they must love it otherwise they wouldn’t have done it, but I’m not convinced by it.”

Anyone agree with Gorden?