Audi A7 Sportback
Comfort of a sedan with the practicality of an estate car
- Published in Vehicle Development.
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Drivers often have more than one car in the garage: a sedan or estate for refinement and practicality and a sports car for when they just want to have fun behind the wheel. OEMs are constantly trying to bring these different characters together in one vehicle.
BMW and Mercedes have already combined the functional benefits of a large car with the driveability of a sports model in the 5 Series GT and CLS coupe. Now Audi has produced the A7 Sportback.
It fits between the OEM’s A8 limousine and the smaller A6 sedan, offering a luxurious ride and generous load space, but it also tries to excite the driver.
The A7 has a 535 litre luggage compartment with the seats up – the BMW and Mercedes provide 440 litres and 505 litres respectively – and an engine range that includes the supercharged gasoline 3.0 V6 TFSI with 220kW of power and 440Nm of torque
Offering a combination of roles is a tough ask for the engineers as it means attacking the project from a different angle to vehicles such as the A8. With a luxury limousine, costs are less of an issue. They can freely use all technologies available, and the most expensive materials, to manufacture the car and make the ride as smooth as possible.
It shows in the base price: the A8 starts at €72,000, so it can absorb the cost of innovations. The A7, in contrast, starts at €52,000, so engineers have to work harder to produce similar refinement at the target price.
Audi is well known for its use of aluminium, but the A7’s engineers had to mix it with high-strength and ultra-high-strength steels to achieve the right balance between cost, weight and stiffness.
“We used aluminium for the hood, the side fenders, the doors and in the hatch. It saved about 60kg in the body structure, which weighs 328.5kg,” Gundolf Kreis, body structure engineer for the A7, says. More aluminium is used in the suspension, with diecast aluminium front suspension-strut mounts and aluminium control arms, pivot bearings and wheel carriers.
“We could have had a full aluminium body but that wasn’t one of the criteria for the A7. We were set cost, weight, efficiency and performance goals – which we met,” Kreis says with a smile.
