IAA 2013: Audi A8/S8 Facelift World debut.

The refreshed A8 and S8 have been introduced at this years IAA Motorshow in Frankfurt on tuesday. Following a couple of teasers and some completely unjustifiable hype from Audi, the model which hasn’t been on sale three years yet has already received a nip and tuck for the 2014 model year.Bringing with it some mildest of the mild styling updates, the biggest giveaway for it being a newer car will be if the customer has specced the.. flashy (see what I did there).. ‘Matrix’ LED light clusters at the front. Audi is making a big deal out of this technology so i’ll give a brief explanation of it and why they did it. The lights as before are full LED, but this time around we have strips of individual diodes connected to sensors which can automatically dim a specific necessary amount given that a car is coming the other way. The diodes can shut off independent of each other depending on how much dimming is needed.

Doesn’t sound particularly ground breaking but it’ll likely make its way across our roads in years to come. Woe betide the man who scoffed at Audis use of LED day runners in 2006/7 saying “they won’t catch on”… Engine options remain largely the same, including the W12 and that remarkable 4.0 twin turbo V8 that has found itself in many of Audis faster offerings recently as well as some of Bentleys slower ones. One last slightly notable upgrade is noise reduction in the cabin. I could go on… but lucky for you I wont…

…I’m less quizzical about the facelift itself but more their motives behind doing it so early. Really though, it doesn’t take the whit of Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Audi is conscious of the new S-Class thundering into the market place along with the imminent arrival of the next generation BMW 7 series in a year or two. Keeping things fresh and ‘exciting’ and I suppose just new really, are paramount to keeping the undivided attention and loyalty of the customer base. Its extremely competitive… which is why this generation A8 saddens me. The truth of the matter is that this A8 is an exceptionally capable car and in truth didn’t, technically speaking, need any refresh at all. The bit that saddens me is that the cars oh so conservative design does its excellence no justice. The new S-Class is equally capable, if not more so and it is no shrinking violet about it. Eye-catching, maybe even striking, but elegant and progressive at the same time. Those enormous screens in the front, and call it juvenile if you want, are a massive talking point. They’re just pukka. The A8 was never an exciting car, but this is on a different level. A capable automobile shot in the foot by its own mediocre visual impact.