The second-generation all-new Audi Q7 has been launched 10 years after the launch of the highly successful first generation. We were there in Switzerland for the first drive
Story: Aspi Bhathena
Having travelled for more than 17 hours, including a six-hour wait at the Munich airport, we reached Sion in Switzerland (not to be confused with the one in Mumbai, near Dharavi) for the first drive of the long-awaited all-new Audi Q7. Although these days the life-cycle of automobiles is about five years, the present Q7 has been selling for the past 10 years.
The Q7 set a new benchmark when it was launched in 2005 and even today the competition struggles to match the Q7. Audi have sold more than 5,00,000 of them over the past 10 years. Thus the Audi engineers had their work cut out to improve on an SUV that had set a benchmark in the past. It took Audi 10 years to bring out the second-generation Q7. Let us now see what they have in store for us.
The new Q7 makes a departure in every area of construction from its predecessor, and it is the first model to be based around Audi’s new second-generation MLB platform. The new MLB platform will underpin the new Porsche Cayenne, Volkswagen Touareg and Bentley Bentayga, besides a whole new generation of Audi cars to come. The new platform has greater modularity than the older MLB structure and is key to the significant reduction of 325 kg in kerb weight over the first-generation Q7, thanks to the use of plenty of hot-formed steel and aluminium within the body, heavily revised suspension featuring a number of aluminium components and developments such as the adoption of aluminium doors.
