Revisiting cars lost to history and that may not have ever even existed is always a fascinating element of this AI Imagined series. Building upon the ideas of others is another. With this car, an augmented take on the 1973 Audi Asso di Picche, the levels of inspiration run deep and are touched by several.
PART 1 1973 AUDI ASSO DI PICCHE BY GIUGIARO & KARMANN
By the early 1970s, automotive design was in transition. The sensual curves that defined the postwar decades were giving way to sharper geometry, while true aerodynamic obsession was still years away. At the center of this shift was Giorgetto Giugiaro and his newly founded Italdesign studio in Turin. Fresh off formative years at Bertone and Ghia, Giugiaro was already reshaping European car design through a pivotal commission from Volkswagen, which would yield the Mk1 Golf, Scirocco, and Passat. At the same time, Italdesign was producing radical showpieces that demonstrated how far this new geometric language could be pushed.
One such project emerged through Wilhelm Karmann, who partnered with Italdesign to create a fully functional concept intended as a rolling pitch and mood board. Built on Audi B1 underpinnings but styled beyond anything Audi was producing at the time, the four-seat coupe was named Asso di Picche, Italian for Ace of Spades. Its wedge-shaped body, delta C-pillar, aggressive windshield rake, and innovative glazing solutions made it feel closer to an exotic than a family-derived platform car. Though it never entered production, its influence led Audi to embrace clean geometry in its next era of cars.
While it’s not one of the most exotic or best known of the wedge era, the 1973 Audi Asso di Picche definitely informed the movement while also inspiring cars like the Volkswagen Scirocco Mk1.
PART 2 AUGMENTED ASSO DI PICCHE BY SEBASTIAN MOTSCH
Years ago and long before AI tools, I was running the Audi website Fourtitude.com and generating my own content with tools like Photoshop. Renderings were fascinating, both as a creator and a fan of others’ work. One such “other” was Sebastian Motsch, whose work you see above I ran across at some point or another.
The design was simple and seemed to augment the already handsome Asso di Picche in just the right ways. Perhaps it’s just stance, but Sebastian’s design was seemingly both lower and wider. While his blog today features a larger diameter take on the car’s original wheels designed by Giugiaro, the original image I’d found and seen here in all its early internet pixelated glory featured wheels from the 90s pre-Volkswagen Group purchase era Bugatti EB110.
The wheels were admittedly part of the draw for me. From an EB110, they were of course impossible at that time for any fan to simply replicate. More importantly though, their simple design seemed an augmentation of simpler 70s era Italian wheels rather than the more bold designs we tended to see on 1990s era supercars like the EB110. In as much, they didn’t seem to chronologically clash with Giugiaro’s early 70’s wedge with straight sides and sharp creases. They worked, and were obscure enough that they blended with the car’s equally obscure design.
The changes didn’t end there though. Motsch had made a couple other modest adjustments. Namely, he gave the car a freshened nose with changed amber corner markers and a switch in sealed beam style lights from dual rounds of the original concept to dual squares more akin to what would go on the ur quattro. The low profile grille gives the car more of a Volkswagen Scirocco Mk2 feel, but it remains much more exotic in proportions and overall feel. Figure it now as an exotic wedge GT rather than the exotic mid-engine sportscar designs that were more the rage at that time.
I published the photos on Fourtitude and I remember the story doing well. I still tend to see the image surface with regularity. Often the photoshop is mistaken for the original Asso di Picche design that is decidedly more tame in comparison. I think that speaks to the alignment of spirit between Giugiaro’s original design and Motsch’s augmented design.
PART 3 APPLYING AI TOOLS
Using some of the latest AI tools, I was able to take the original low-resolution file I had in my archive and adjust it up in size, then take it out of the wooded backdrop of the original Asso di Picche press photo location and render it in a white photo studio so that the focus can be on the car itself.
Tools like Google’s Nano Banana are excellent at adding back in detail. They’re also pretty seamless at building detail where detail may be lost… like say a low resolution image as seen here.
PART 4 DIFFERENT BODY STYLES
With the freedoms of such fast and detailed renderings, additional angles weren’t the only product. I was also able to play with various body styles. Creating takes on an open-top Spyder or a long-roofed Shootingbrake were obvious and look the business.
One of my favorites though is a take on the car with more of a “targa” style roof. Such a design was toyed with in the early 2000s with the TT Open Sky concept. And while it was a little ungainly on the Mk1 TT’s form, a similar design really seems to work on the most recent Audi Concept C shown in September and likely heading to market with a similar configuration.
Adding a targa-style “Open Sky” body style to the augmented Asso di Picche was an interesting proposition. Since I had no rear view of the car to work with, adding 80s-style louvers to the rear window was a detail the tool threw in on its own. Applied here with the Open Sky configuration, the unintended family lineage to the Concept C becomes obvious and intriguing.
These renderings are part of a series of work for my Instagram account @4Rings.AI. See it and even more creations there. Also follow Sebastian Motsch with his design work on Instagram at @photoschopchops.
The amount of reworking of an original theme going on here is truly worth noting. The Asso di Picche began as Giorgetto Giugiaro and Karmann’s rethink on what was possible to build from the Audi 80 (B1) architecture. From there, Sebastian Motsch showed how you could augment the design with a few key changes in order to make something decidedly more exotic. Throw in some AI tools and some modern direction on body styles and you have a whole other fresh take. Personally, I love a story with a lot of layers and this one’s got them… in spades.
RELATED LINKS
Audi Italdesign Asso di Picche Concept, SebastianMotsch.com
@photoschopchops (Sebastian Motsch) on Instagram
Asso di Picche with Bugatti Wheels Version, VirtualModels.org
PHOTO GALLERY
