Audi autonomy in 2025? Hmm…

The car industry has spent decades imagining how autonomous cars will look, and with a retractable steering wheel, reclining lounge seats and a radical dashboard within a ‘mobile living room’ interior, the Audi Grand Sphere is set to showcase a number of features seen on many fanciful concept cars produced in the past.

The big difference is that the Grand Sphere's designer. Marc Lichte, insists that it’s not a fanciful vision of a possibly imaginary future but a close preview of a new production car that will arrive in dealerships in less than four years.

Given the focus on level-four (hands off. eyes off) autonomy, that might seem impossibly optimistic. Are we really less than four years away from being able to safely lie back and watch a film from the driver’s seat while on the motorway?

Probably not. Expect the production version of the Grand Sphere to launch with level-two autonomy, which is to say the sort of ADAS you can find on many current cars. Level fourwill follow a few years later, and even then only on highways that feature high-level connected infrastructure.

Still, the future is coming-and possibly sooner than you think.