2010 Audi Quattro Prestige W/ Navi & Rearcam on 2040-cars

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Justin Bell laps Willow Springs... in the dark... using only night vision

Night vision has made its way into quite a few luxury cars as a night-driving safety feature, but eBay Motors wanted to see if the technology could be used to actually drive the car. Former racer and World's Faster Car Show host Justin Bell grabbed the keys to an Audi A7 and headed to Willow Springs Raceway to find out.
As if driving in the dark of the desert night wasn't hard enough, the car's windshield and side windows were blacked out, so Bell's driving relied completely on the three-inch night vision display located in the gauge cluster. In addition to navigating the track, his producers also threw in a few surprises for Bell on the track. We don't want to spoil too much for you, but based on the speeds exhibited in the video, we don't think 24-hour endurance races will be adding this tech any time soon; that being said, he probably drove the car faster and better than we could have.
Scroll down to watch how Bell does lapping the track using only the car's night vision.

Audi Airomorph is a sleek shape-shifting senior thesis

Eric Kim just graduated from the from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, at the end of the spring 2014 semester, and for his senior thesis project he came up with this futuristic Audi endurance racer called the Airomorph. He even got some input Audi designer Kris Vancoppenolle.
The Airomorph imagines a future Audi racer for Le Mans that features adjusting fabric panels to fine-tune the car's aerodynamics as it laps the course - a technology inspired by catamaran racing. "I started from scratch and had the freedom to deliver and execute a white space design for the future," said Kim to Autoblog via email. It's also somewhat similar to the idea behind BMW Gina concept, although Kim says that wasn't an inspiration for his design. The body here is made from a single piece of a silver, expansion-resistant material stretched over a frame underneath. The fabric anchors at the wheels, front and rear section with movable cables, and hydraulic actuators pull the wires to shift the aero as needed.
The actual shape echoes Audi endurance racers from the past and present. In profile, you can easily see the current R18 with its arcing cockpit and fin down the rear. Of course, that's interpreted through a little bit of Blade Runner with the covered wheels sticking out from the body. The front shows the rectangular shapes from the earlier R15. There doesn't appear to be any way to actually see out of the vehicle, though.

Audi's next R8 snapped running the 'Ring nearly naked

Following the debut of the Lamborghini Huracán, work is now well well under way on its cousin. That, of course, would be the next-generation Audi R8, the followup to the model that put Ingolstadt on the supercar map in 2006 and has been on the market ever since. That's an eight-year lifespan, though to be fair, for 2014 it has gotten a pretty meaningful update. Still, that's a long lifecycle, even if the Gallardo with which it shares its underpinnings was around even longer. In other words, it's about due for replacement.
Fortunately, that's just what Audi has in the cards. We've seen prototypes wearing heavy camouflage lapping the Nürburgring a couple of times over the past few weeks, but now it's been snapped nearly completely undisguised, with largely bare black bodywork giving us an even better look at what to anticipate.
So what are we looking at here? A sharper-looking take on the existing design, for starters, so onlookers and customers alike shouldn't have any trouble identifying this as an R8 - but a newer one at that. It seems to take some cues from the new TT, particularly around the headlights, with more squared-off elements throughout. There's an adaptive rear wing poking out the back and more pronounced side-blade intakes between the doors and the rear wheels, which themselves are wearing ultra low-profile rubber.