Audi’s annual conference to announce its financial performance is seldom a boring affair. The official media interaction after the board meeting at its headquarters in Ingolstadt, Germany, is always preceded by announcements regarding new products for the future and new technologies that help Audis stay at the cutting edge of automotive performance.

A few years ago, the night before the conference, I found myself sharing the dinner table with a senior materials expert from Audi’s research team. He told me about the fascinating work that goes into ensuring every Audi’s new car smell is fine tuned to be distinctive and uniform across models. He and his team are responsible for tweaking the materials used in every Audi, including leather and plastics, to make sure that they are not only safe, but combine together to offer a pleasant and unique new car smell to the occupants.

In its attempts to take the sensory experience of owning an Audi a step further, the German luxury brand’s acoustics engineers have analysed the sounds of the car’s components both inside and outside the vehicle and have come up with a unique, special creation called the “Audi Click”. After fine-tuning the sound of the click for physical buttons, rotary controllers and knobs, by using the apt material for the springs and metal clickers, these engineers have gone ahead and embedded the same sound into its other digital interfaces too.

“A sound of just a few milliseconds duration that expresses the precision and premium quality of the brand”, claims Audi. The unique click is expected to be the standard feedback sound across Audi models.

Use your mobile phone to scan this QR Code to view a four-minute video about the ‘Audi Click’. If you don’t have a QR Code scanner/ reader, you can download one from any of the App Stores – Apple App Store for iOS devices and Google Play for Android devices.

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