Audi Q9
The Q9 listens on materials, argues on UX.
Three reviewers cover the same embargoed interior and reach the same divided verdict — Audi has heard the easy half of what customers wanted, and only the easy half.
For two years Audi has been on a listening tour — physical buttons coming back, piano-black going, knurled wheels restored. The Q9, revealed in interior-only camouflage this week, is the first flagship to make that claim concrete. The three reviewers admitted under embargo all read it the same way: Audi listened where listening was a finish-spec call. Where it would have meant rewinding the UX, the Q9 ships exactly what its platform demanded.
What Audi fixed
The list of fixes opens with Auditography cataloguing from inside the loyalist circle. Piano-black — gone. The capacitive haptic switches on the door cards — replaced with proper hardware. The steering-wheel airbag cover, finally trimmed in leather instead of the panel he has long called controversial. "How many years have we asked for this?" he asks, with the exhaustion of someone who has been asking that long. What Car? reaches the same verdict from the segment side: alpaca wool, Nappa leather, a fabric-padded dashboard, a centre-stack decor strip in open-cell carbon fibre instead of fingerprint-magnet gloss. Where Audi has owned its mistakes, this is the strongest material answer the cabin has shipped in years.
What Audi kept
The other half of the cabin is where platform-level decisions went unrewound. Air-vent direction has no manual control on a £95,000 flagship; adjustment lives in the touchscreen. Autogefuhl calls it "a disease inspired by Tesla" — UX that ships because someone could, not because anyone wanted it. The indicator and wiper stalk move to a single column-mounted stub lifted from the Q3, too short to find by feel while turning: "this is not form follows function," he says. The gear shifter migrates up there too; "don't try to reinvent the wheel," Auditography answers. The panel is unanimous — not on taste but on allocation, and allocation is what the listening tour was supposed to have fixed.
The third camera
The third camera in this slate sits at What Car?, the UK consumer outlet translating a £95K interior for the buyer about to write the cheque. Its reading is conspicuously different — features catalogued, not interrogated. The screen-only vents get a mild "would have been better to perhaps see some physical controls," immediately softened by the consolation that the climate bar stays pinned along the bottom. The seam the other two cameras walk along is invisible from this angle. That isn't a failing; it is the reading Audi's listening tour was pitched at. Customers don't audit engineering allocation. They decide whether the cabin photographs well next to a Bentayga, and from here, the Q9 does.
Why does Audi need to do Tesla? I'm actually speechless.
The most important thing for Audi now is getting better in the reliability standings, customer service, and the customer feels valued.
The Q9 represents a real moment for Audi to reassert itself in terms of material quality.
The reviewers, side by side
3 reviewers. 2 questions. Where the arguments overlap and where they diverge.
Listening, as long as it's free
The unanimity is the verdict. Three reviewers under embargo independently produced the same reading — praise the finish, refuse the UX — and Audi's listening claim survives only the first half. Materials are what listening looks like when it costs a finish-spec change. UX is what listening looks like when it would cost a platform commitment. The Q9 is the Audi where the listening tour got cheap, and the panel's most surprising agreement — Tesla-disease vent control on a £95,000 flagship — is the cheapest line in the brochure.
Audi has been listening at the volume it could afford — and that volume stops at the touchscreen.