Opinion: Audi is suffering from catastrophic ‘Design Lag’

Friends, have you noticed the new and horrifying ‘lag’ afflicting Audi?

It’s ‘Design Lag’. Yes, like the lazy turbocharger in an ur-Quattro or RS2 taking its sweet, sweet time to dispatch any power at all to the legendary quattro AWD, there’s a gaping chasm between what Audi’s styling department has promised, and what’s being served up on the street.

The problem here is that concept cars don’t make sense anymore. Showing off future intentions and waiting for them to trickle down to showroom models was logical in the 1970s or 1980s, because the only way anyone could keep their finger on the pulse of automotive design was to buy a magazine once a month. Or stare out of their classroom/office/bedroom window and see what had broken down nearby.

But now we have Instagram, TikTok, forums, over-the-air updated games, instant messaging, and AI. If you want to see what the next family of Audis look like, ask a bot to strip off the camo, or make something up.

Audi revealed the handsome, refreshing Concept C in September 2025 – almost a year ago. I went to a studio to see it, had my phone confiscated, my glasses checked for Meta Perve-vision, and we shot this in-depth First Look walkaround.

Since then, Audi has revealed one car that looks like the Concept C: the Nuvolari limited-edition supercar, which is a rebodied Lamborghini Temerario in a tailored German suit.

It’s also unveiled lots of overwrought cars that completely ignore the Concept C’s clean-sheet motifs, because they were already sketched and signed off before Audi changed course.

Take the absurd new Q9 with its grotesque, meme-worthy grille. The latest Allroad, wearing the old RS6’s skin like a sadistic serial killer. The blocky new Q7 which seems to have crashed head-on into a chain-link fence. And the facelifted Q4 e-tron… which still looks like a Skoda. None of them look like they could possibly be from the same company as the Concept C.

Sure, the new RS5 looks tremendous, all flexed wheelarches and barely-contained malevolence. But it’s hardly the unfussy surfaces and vertical micro-grille cues of the Concept C.

Same story inside. All new or near-future Audis are mired in ‘My First Laptop’ multiplex purgatory, with oceans of cheap’n’nasty piano-black trim and a dearth of the knurled metal switchgear that made Audi interiors the world standard.

Now look back inside the Concept C (below). It’s all horizontal lines and tasteful minimalism. A round steering wheel and lashings of brushed aluminium. Small displays that hide to reduce your screen-time. It’s fabulous. So good, it rattled Mercedes' outgoing design chief into snarling it “had been designed in the 1990s.” Which is exactly the point.

Awkward times. Audi’s new design team dreamt up a car that told the world, ‘sorry we went over the top with grilles and screens, we’re going to make up for it now’, but had to follow it up with a load of already approved cars from an old, discredited era.

Now you understand why Porsches always look the same…