- Audi’s design boss stresses the importance of tactility
- He denounced big screens in a recent interview with Top Gear
- Concept C previews a beautifully analogue interior
The man behind the hugely successful Land Rover Defender and more recent Range Rover iterations left the UK to join Audi in the summer of 2024 and since then he has been busy at work setting the German brand on a new design direction — one that isn’t afraid to ruffle a few feathers, it seems.
Fresh off the back of designing Audi’s new F1 car, as well as unleashing the tantalizing Concept C, which previews an upcoming electric two-seat sports car, Frascella has been talking to Top Gear UK about the German marque’s future design direction.
During discussions, the creative lead dropped a few truth bombs, including that fact that he thinks electric cars don’t have to look like electric cars. “A car needs to be electric, and be efficient, but it needs to look premium in execution of proportions,” he said.
In addition to this, Frascella reiterated what he believes is the importance of “tactility”, claiming that “big screens are not the best experience” and that enormous touchscreens that now span the entire width of many modern car dashboards is “technology for the sake of technology”.
“For us, technology is there when you need it, not there when not needed. This mix of digital and analogue, the tactility, the perception of quality that is so important for Audi, the precision, the metal parts… we talk about the Audi click. These made Audi what Audi is,” he told Top Gear.
This approach is perfectly embodied in the Audi Concept C interior, which fuses physical controls, fashioned from anodized aluminum, with a diminutive 10.4-inch foldable centre display that disappears when not in use.
Not everyone is a fan
Audi’s ‘shy tech’ approach can be viewed as a backlash against the current trend for an increasing amount of screen real estate inside of cars. Interiors are now, more often than not, bereft of physical buttons.
Mercedes-Benz has been pushing ever-more into this territory with its latest EVs, packing interiors with ‘Hyper’ and ‘Superscreen’ technology, and a chat between Mercedes’ design boss Gorden Wagener and Top Gear last year revealed exactly what he thinks of Audi’s approach.
He said the Concept C’s interior looked “like it was designed in 1995” at the time, and that there was “too little tech” inside. Despite being a fan of analogue things, Wagener said that “going back to all switches will not work”.
However, this opinion is in direct contradiction to what vast swathes of the internet and the car-buying public are calling for, which is a return to physical switches and buttons, especially when it comes to controlling key car functionality.
In fact, Europe’s leading car safety assessment program, EuroNCAP, has said it will make its tests tougher, awarding manufacturers for “placement, clarity and ease of use” of key car functionality and penalizing those that commit everything to a complicated and distracting touchscreen.
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