The Hindu Business Line : Designing an Audi, from clay

Recently in Ingolstadt, Germany They have some of the most sophisticated gadgets — radar on the side mirror that warns the driver when he is banking a curve so sharply that the vehicle is likely to collide against another in the adjacent lane or sensors that switch on the wipers when the first drop of rain falls on the windshield, to name just a couple.

But these premium luxury cars begin in the design studios not as drawings on a computer. They are sketched out by hand and, once the designers are happy, the first live model is formed out of clay. “It is a practice we still follow for all our models,” says Mr Gary Telaak, who heads the exterior design team at Audi AG, the German luxury carmaker.

The clay model, he explains to a group of international journalists, will be a near replica of the vehicle that the company will put in production a few years later. For instance, if it is the Q7 sports utility vehicle, the clay model will resemble the SUV as it will be manufactured, in size and interior space. “If you paint the clay model and put door handles on it and place it outside, people will tend to believe that it is a real car,” Mr Telaak tells the journalists, who are on a visit sponsored by Audi to its headquarters in Ingolstadt, about 80 km north of Munich.

Why clay? According to Mr Telaak, clay provides for great flexibility. The designers can scoop out some part, fill it up later and do all kinds of modifications. More importantly, Audi believes that having a clay model is the reason behind the superior surface quality of its cars. “Hand-modelling is something that seems a bit too traditional, but the quality of the surface is because of hand-modelling,” he says.

Audi has about 160 people in its design team. After the modifications to the clay model are approved by the senior management, the next stage is to go for computer-aided design, when the finer details are worked out.

According to Mr Telaak, from the first sketch to the first prototype, it takes a good five years. Car companies are looking to reduce this time period, to be able to launch new models more quickly.

Audi, according to company officials, has a different design strategy for each range of cars. This is meant to reflect the basic character of the car, be it for the radiator grill, the headlamps or the rear. Audi, the officials say, generally goes in for a model facelift when the model has been in the market for five years and with at least two years to go for the product lifecycle to end.

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