I’d been creating renderings of cars since the late 1990s. Early on it was an early black and white scan complimenting software by a name I can’t remember and Microsoft Paint. Later came Photoshop. In 2023 I began playing with AI via the @4Rings.AI account, and today it’s a blending of all those skills using a mix of AI and photoshop.
Today’s featured AI Imagined focus is a similar blend – something more outlandish from the earlier days creating imagery on the Midjourney tool, adjusting details in photoshop, later adding more detail and angles with Nano Banana and a few more hu-manual adjustments for good measure.
I believe that’s how AI tools are supposed to be, used as a tool to augment performance – neither human replacement nor mass quantities of slop choking up the system.
Moving past the philosophical, the thinking behind this design and the design itself are something I wanted to share. I’ve always enjoyed creating cars that never existed. Current, future or classic make no difference. They’re untethered by reality or product development budgets and so can be whatever I or anyone else want them to be.
In this case, I’d been working on a query that was particularly fruitful at giving me a red concept car design. The more I varied it, the more I began to see designs I found fascinating. I couldn’t decide on the best direction at first, so published my Top 3 as a series of 1982 quattro era concept cars. And for names, I went with the names of each rally Michéle Mouton won that year in the battle for the WRC Driver’s Championship that she barely missed out on. That story was the stuff of legends.
Now, unlike later decades, this wasn’t a time when Audi was just putting out concept cars at every auto show. The possibility of launching three in the months after that 1982 season ended are unlikely. Even still, I loved the theme and in this case it was the car named for the Rally do Brasil. And, as with quattro that is four in Italian, I went with Brazil’s Italian spelling of Brasile.
The car itself is a shooting brake form befitting a Hot Wheels design. It’s raised more than any quattro of that era – even a rally car. Given it’s a show car, that’s not really a concern.
The form is somewhat wedge-meets shooting brake and the size is imagined roughly the footprint of an ur quattro – built on an ur quattro much like Pininfarina’s quattro-based Quartz concept.
Other distinctive details worth focusing on are at the front. It takes Audi’s 1980s horizontal grille fascia and replaces it all with glass. The lighting is found behind it, while the engine breaths via a scoop-like large air intake below that strip of glass.
Would it have worked? I don’t know, but later Volkswagen Passat (B3) designs had a similar no-grille and lower intake design, so it seems period correct to have Audi experiment with their own creative take on that a few years before.
So yes, it is completely imaginary, but it remains one of my favorite designs from the early @4Rings.AI work. It’s even cooler to see it from many angles now that AI tools have made imagining such things that much easier as they’ve gotten progressively better.
PHOTO GALLERY
