Audi shows off new RS6 Avant

Apart from fashion, I’m not sure that there’s any industry that’s as insatiably hungry for newness than the automotive world. It’s a devastatingly design-focused business, endlessly devouring itself in the name of creating something unique, something you haven’t seen before.

Even the notoriously iterative smartphone market is cut more slack: Apple can effortlessly get away with slapping an “S” on an iPhone’s name and using the body for another year. Cars are different. If you release a new model that looks essentially the same as the one it replaces, you’re going to hear about it. People are going to ask questions. I can’t tell the difference. It’s the same car.

There are, as always, exceptions to the rule. Retro-themed vehicles are constrained by the boundaries of the classics they’re trying to emulate, and therefore we have an expectation that a Mini will always look substantially like a Mini, a Fiat 500 will always look substantially like a Fiat 500, and so on. And then there’s another kind of exception entirely: a car so relentlessly unchanging for so many years that it cements itself as a de facto icon. These cars aren’t “retro”-styled, because they never strayed from their roots in the first place: the Porsche 911, the Jeep Wrangler, the Land Rover Defender, the Mercedes Geländewagen.

All this brings me to the debut of the third-generation RS6 being introduced to South Africa this week. If you’re not looking closely, you might swear it’s the same car as the one it replaces (2014). Even if you are looking closely, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell which one’s new and which one’s old, unless you’ve got a working knowledge of Audi’s corporate design language: there’s a tweaked, more aggressive grille here, a different headlamp pattern there. The interior is substantially modernized — but in the history books, great cars aren’t judged by their interiors nearly as much as they are their exteriors (heck, the Ferrari F40 — one of the most iconic exotics ever made — barely has an interior at all).

There’s a sense that the sameness has caused the new RS6’s debut to fall flat: it’s always hard to get excited about things you can’t see, like a new instrument cluster and a re-engineered drivetrain. I get it. But the question we need to start asking is: can the RS6 apply for “icon” status? Is it okay for generation after generation of RS6 to look roughly the same as the original, which knocked socks off when it debuted in SA in 2003? Is the design original enough to carry forward indefinitely, or does Audi need to let it go and create something entirely original with each new generation of car?

I don’t know the answer, but I’d argue that Audi has earned the right to give this a shot. The RS6 remains as distinctive a visual element as anything in the production automotive world, and I certainly don’t tire of seeing these things on the street (I suppose I might be singing a different tune if I lived in, say, Cape Town). And let’s not forget that the RS6 is a legitimate sports car: as distinctive as its design may be, it’s also essentially a reworked, detuned Lamborghini Huracán. Judge it by its looks, sure, but judge it by its performance on the street and on the track, too.

The Audi RS6 Avant will be priced at R 1,465,000, inclusive of VAT and the standard Audi Freeway Plan (5 year/100 000km), also available to be extended to 6 years/200 000km for its 4.0T FSI quattro tiptronic variant.

Then again, it’ll take another 50 years before we can grant the RS6’s design the same untouchable status. Let’s just take it one generation at a time, shall we?

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Papi Mabele

Papi Mabele has a marketing background, he is a digital marketing expert with extensive experience in launching and building global brands in the emerging markets. Papi is also an avid tech writer, enthusiast and all round tech junkie. As a freelance writer and analyst he has been numerously published in Popular Mechanics (SA), GQ South Africa, Premier Magazine, Driven Magazine, Bloem News, Courant, The Weekly, Enthooze Magazine and PiE magazine amongst others.