Audi updates TT theme

The second-generation rendition is bigger, more powerful, and uses a subtle metals mix and match.

For companies that successfully achieve a vehicle design sufficiently individualistic and distinctive to separate it from the normal signatures associated with a particular brand, type, or class, an inevitable and daunting challenge is what the second generation must look like. Should the successor model retain most of the previous car's design cues, but updated to reflect advances in technology, weight savings, and emerging-market requirements, or should it be a complete aesthetic departure? Audi faced the need to make such decisions when, in 2002, it decided that its TT, influenced by Bauhaus styling concepts, would be replaced in 2006.

After some agonizing, Audi's designers opted to retain the essence of the original car's distinctively rounded body shell revealed in the fall of 1998, but to give it a crisper appearance, lengthen the wheelbase, make it slightly longer and wider overall, and use an aluminum and steel mix. As with any car, opinions may vary on the aesthetic result, but there is no disputing the car's enhanced road presence. Even the big, and controversial, new-styled Audi radiator grille is integrated successfully and does not have the add-on appearance that it is characteristic of some models.