Cars & Autos | Sunday 31 May, 2015 3:42 pm |

Journalists experienced piloted driving in an Audi A7 on the streets of Shanghai as the first Consumer Electronics Show in Asia kicks off. The keynote address and the exhibition booth for the premium brand focused on the connected car of the future, with infotainment services, new control and display concepts and innovative new light features.

Audi connect was the centerpiece of the exhibition presentation by Audi, the most successful premium carmaker in China. This gives cars with LTE the fastest Internet connection currently available; Audi is working with Huawei to develop an LTE module specifically for the Asian market. Passengers can connect their mobile devices to a WLAN hotspot. For drivers, cars will include online services that are tailored for the Chinese market and that drivers can use without looking at their mobile phones.

The Audi phone box is used to conveniently couple a smartphone to the car – it can charge cell phones inductively, i.e. wirelessly, according to the Qi standard. Another new infotainment feature is the 3D sound in the Audi Q7. The sound system by Bose and Bang & Olufsen incorporates additional speakers that expand the spatial experience of sound.

Another innovation is the Audi tablet, which is celebrating its premiere in the new Q7 and which was developed especially for use in cars. It connects with the MMI navigation plus via Wi-Fi and can also be used outside of the car. In its software package for China, the new Audi joint venture partner Baidu is represented with its web browser and an app store. Another highlight is a new type of gesture control for the Audi tablet – in the future it will let passengers sit back comfortably while operating the device.

In the field of piloted driving, Audi is at the forefront of progress in the automotive industry – over the next few years the brand will be introducing its new technologies, step by step, into production. At CES Asia, the company demonstrated the high maturity level of the project with a prototype – a piloted driving Audi A7 Sportback. Journalists completed a roughly 15-kilometer (9.3-mi) route through Shanghai in the car.

The first CES Asia took place May 25–27, 2015. The large electronics exhibition is organized by the Consumer Electronics Association, which also hosts the annual CES in Las Vegas, Nevada (USA). There too, Audi has established itself since 2010 as one of the world’s major exhibitors from the automotive segment, and has opened the show several times with the traditional keynote address. Rupert Stadler, Board Chairman of AUDI AG, and his colleagues, Professor Dr. Hackenberg and Luca de Meo, are also serving in this capacity at the debut of CES Asia. On May 24, the evening before the exhibition opens, Audi presented the keynote address before 1,000 guests in the Da Guan Theater in Shanghai.

Since 2013, Audi engineers have been working in the company’s own Research and Development Center in Beijing to develop solutions especially for Asian markets. As a component of the worldwide development network, the R&D Center works closely with all Technical Development departments in Ingolstadt. Thanks to its location in the center of China’s capital city, the researchers are close to Audi’s most important market.