2012 Audi S5 Premium Plus on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Audi A0 in development based on VW Up!

Bigger, it seems, is no longer better. Volkswagen has made waves with its Up! city car, a plucky three-door that's been a bit of a hit since it burst onto the automotive scene, spawning a number of variants during its short life. And while our European friends have gotten a Cross Up!, a commercial version, an EV model, Seat- and Skoda-badged variants, and a rumored diesel-electric Twin-Up!, the small city car has been lacking in terms of its premium content.
That fact makes this rumor rather tantalizing - Audi might be working on its own version of the front-engined, front-drive city car, to be called the A0. The report comes from AutoExpress, which claims Audi CEO Rupert Stadler wants a premium Up! that features a distinctive interior and exterior treatment.
Changes could include a trapezoidal grille, in addition to premium exterior features like LED lighting and alloy wheels. The cabin would feature leather and likely a version of Audi's MMI infotainment system, while power would come from a 109-horsepower, 1.0-liter engine found in the Up! GT Concept.

Electric turbos promise big performance and efficiency gains in the near future

An electric turbo system boosts efficiency between 15 and 20 percent, according to Audi.
Turbochargers, like acoustic guitars, use moving air to create magic. And electric turbochargers, like electric guitars, provide the ability to amp up that magic to amazing new levels.

Audi re-illuminates Sport Quattro with Laserlight concept for CES

Automakers typically spend months working on a concept car, then unveil it at a car show and move on to the next. But Audi has demonstrated a propensity at refining the same concepts and bringing them back for more. Just look at how many time Audi iterated its E-Tron concept, and how many diesel R8s it toyed with. It brought the Italdesign Parcour out of retirement and rechristened it the Audi Nanuk, and it's been doing the same with the Quattro concept for the past several years. The German automaker rolled out the first Quattro concept back in 2010, and followed up with the reborn Sport Quattro concept less than a year ago. And now it's preparing to unveil yet another.
Called the Sport Quattro Laserlight concept, this time it's not as radical a departure from the Sport Quattro concept as that was from the first Quattro concept. In fact, there's really only one vital difference. That'd be the laser headlights "that leave all previous systems in the dark," according to the press release below. The system uses matrix LEDs around the outside of the element as low beams, and lasers on the inside for high beams. Measured in mere microns, the laser diodes are significantly smaller than LEDs, while lighting up the road ahead for nearly half a kilometers (1,640 feet), providing twice the lighting range and three times the brightness of LED high beams.
Otherwise the concept car you see here and which Audi will display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week is essentially the same as the one it showed in Frankfurt this past September. It's got the same measurements, wearing the same CFRP bodywork, with the same interior and the same 700-horsepower hybrid powertrain, only the yellow exterior has been repainted Plasma Red and the black interior redone in a more low-key Slate Grey, as you can see from the high-res image gallery above.