AUDI AICON 2022

Audi Brand Summit 2018 in Shenzhen, China, the German maker confirmed that the Aicon will be on the road by 2021. And it'll deliver 700-800km of range per charge.

Still, it's inside where you really need to be, because there is no steering wheel and no pedals. With the promise of it being on some Chinese city streets by 2021, we suspect a tap of an app could see this car roll up to collect you to your onward destination.

That's because Audi is imagining the Aicon as a car you'll never need to drive yourself, which has allowed the German maker to fit a pair of lounge chairs up front, while the passenger side is designed to shuttle back and recline into a position that's far more horizontal than you'd ever expect to be in a car (if not quite a full 180-degree lie-flat seat, as per an international flight). Once reclined we felt a bit like we were at the dentist... which we're sure isn't what Audi intended.

The seat also slides back miles from the dashboard, so we were wondering how we might change the music, tell the car where to go, or just do the things you might generally interface with a car for. Well, Audi has come up with a number of clever ways to allow this.

Firstly, and most simply, the interface wraps right around the car, so those black panels in the upper door are actually screens. The interface menu will follow you as the seat moves around the car – so it's never out of reach.

But it can't do everything, so to help more Audi has thrown in some artificial intelligence (hence the "AI" at the start of the Aicon's name, see what they did there?). There's a personal assistant, called PIA, as represented by the triangle icon, with whom you can talk. PIA seems pretty good at picking up your requests and commands, we had a great chat (although she's a bit too heavily on-brand), but there's another three years for this to be further enhanced.

But the coolest part of the interface is the gaze selection. By simply looking at one of the menu tiles on the main dashboard for a couple of seconds it is selected. a double tap of the wooden section on the door is used to enter that menu. To our amazement, it worked. And – if you haven't experienced gaze selection before – it feels like magic, as if thinking actions into life.