What's this all about then?

This is all about the future, or at least Audi's vision of it. The Audi Urban Futures event, now in its fourth year, has awarded prizes (including €100,000 - about £79,000 - for first place) to the most innovative ideas for seamlessly blending the future of motoring with the future of living in cities. It's a serious exercise for Audi - one that it would be easy to dismiss as so much corporate tinsel were it not for the fact that by 2040, two thirds of the world's population will live in cities and that's a lot of potential customers for a brand that still desperately wants to beat BMW and Mercedes-Benz to the global No.1 luxury car brand spot.

That point was made by Audi boss Rupert Stadler, never a man afraid to come forward with his opinions. "We must decode the DNA of urban mobility. Without that mobility our economy would quickly grind to a halt. There will always be a market for private cars in cities, no matter how good the public transport system gets, and part of being premium in the future means more space in cities and more time for citizens" he told an assembled party of journalists, politicians (Germans and global) and the teams of academics vying for the prize.

So, who won?

There were four teams representing four cities - Mexico City, Berlin, Seoul and Boston. In the end it was the Mexican team that won, with what was possibly the most straightforward concept of the lot - farming 'big data' information from as many of Mexico City's 22 million inhabitants as it can to better understand how, where and why they travel. As one of the most congested cities on Earth, for the Mexican team, this is about far more than airy-fairy prize competitions - this is a real problem that needs solving now.

Boston proposed using a clever algorithm that could predict how new and emerging technologies would have an impact on travel, transport and road space usage. Seoul tried to find new ways for premium brands such as Audi to be seen as 'paying back' to society at large while Berlin's was the farthest-out concept - a series of annular-wheel pods, that could whisk an individual around town or join together in a connected train to transport groups going to a common destination.

What's Audi got to do with all this?

Good question. At the forefront of all the proposals in the competition was Audi's burgeoning automated driving technology - illustrated graphically recently when a self-driving RS 7 prototype set a scorching lap time around the Hockenheim race track. The tech talk was not about lap times here though, but about intelligent use of road space. Systems such as Audi's self-parking technology (where your car wanders off on its own to find a parking space) could, claim its experts, reduce the space needs of car parks by as much as 50 per cent, dramatically freeing up urban landscapes.

Clearly, that kind of thing is going to need co-operation with city planners and in that lies the real purpose here. Audi wants to place itself as much as possible at the heart of urban planning, to find ways to integrate the way we use cars with the way we use public transport and the way we use cities. On the one hand, there's genuine altruism here - Audi wants to make the world a better place. On the other, there's a simple imperative that suggests that Audi can use programmes such as this to circumvent any potential city centre car bans that many major cities have been openly talking about.

All high-tech pie-in-the-sky?

Not quite. Audi had a prototype of its new traffic light monitoring system on hand for us to try. An otherwise regular A3 hatchback was equipped with the system that communicates with a central server that knows how long the lights will stay green or red for. Using that knowledge, and the satnav, it can then give you a target speed (rather like the 'Lap Delta' on a racing car) that should see you hit as many lights as possible while they're still green. Get caught out by a red? No problem, the system will use the stop-start to fire up the engine five seconds before the light goes green again, meaning you don't have to sit staring at the light, waiting for the go-signal. It's a bit distracting to drive with at first, but you do get used to it and there's no doubt that it makes driving in town a bit more relaxing.

When can I have one?

Not for a while yet. It's still at the prototype stage and the problem is that it's not just up to Audi - city managers and councils have to not only integrate their traffic signalling systems, they then have to agree to making that data available to Audi. I wouldn't be holding your breath, put it that way. All of which was underlined by Stadler's statement that "our individual freedom will be enhanced if we share a lot more."

Neil Briscoe - 26 Nov 2014