Audi Q7
Audi's Q7 Arrives Halfway Through Its Own Transition
Six first-look reviews land the same split verdict: the cabin has turned a corner the badge, the buttons and the powertrain still haven't.
The third-generation Q7 is the first Audi in years its own loyalists are eager to defend — and the first they struggle to. Across six reveal videos the verdict arrives in the same shape: real progress, named gratefully, then a list of everything left undone. This is a car caught mid-transformation, photographed on shore power before a single reviewer has driven it, and already being called better than ever.
What's arrived
Start with what the panel agrees on, because the agreement is the news. After years of cabins entombed in piano black, the Q7's interior reads as a genuine correction — open-pore wood, fabric across the dash, gloss plastic exiled to the corners nobody touches. Chasing Cars found a prototype "built like a tank," with quality "on the improve and the upswing" and the best it had seen from Audi in years; What Car?, which named the old Q7 its premium SUV of the year four times running, calls this one "a cut above." The eye, in other words, is satisfied.
The half you can touch
Then the hand goes looking. Carwow credits the genuine exhausts — "no fakery here" — and the lovely wood, before turning to the infotainment surround: "it's massive. I hate it." Climate control and even the direction of the air now live inside the touchscreen, buttons traded for menus. The materials arrived for the camera; some of them, and most of the controls, haven't arrived for the fingertips.
The pivot it hasn't made
Two transitions are conspicuously incomplete. Auto Express adores the electric doors — "just like a Rolls-Royce Phantom" — yet notes the Q7 launches on diesel alone, while the BMW X5 it is chasing will arrive with combustion, hybrid, electric and even hydrogen. Autogefuhl, the most exhaustive voice on the panel, credits the reduced gloss black to Audi finally listening, then catalogues what it still won't do: untangle an options list he reads aloud as "optional, optional, optional," charge fairly for screen themes, or drop the animal materials nearly every rival has already abandoned.
The face it lost
Which leaves the hardest voice to wave off. Auditography has photographed the four rings for twenty years and counts people inside the company as friends; nobody here wants to love the Q7 more. He calls the cabin the best Audi has built in five years, and means it. Then he walks to the front and the affection curdles — the split headlights are "the cancer of the automotive industry," the silver grille frame is gone, the quattro badge that sat in the grille for fifty years has vanished, and the new logo font is the very one the just-revealed Q9 quietly swapped back for the classic. From the front, he says, it "looks like any other brand on the streets."
Quality, both build quality and material quality, appears to be on the improve and the upswing at Audi.
It was our premium SUV of the year for 4 years running... these days it's being somewhat overshadowed.
It's a bit like my Porsche 911. Looks good when you hit it. Bit on the cheap side.
At launch, the new Audi Q7 will be available exclusively with good old-fashioned diesel power.
Every manufacturer offers an animal-free solution, like literally every manufacturer, except Audi.
The interior is slowly getting there, and some of the iconic, so important details are coming back.
The reviewers, side by side
6 reviewers. 3 questions. Where the arguments overlap and where they diverge.
Moving the right way
The tell is that nobody here has driven it. Every superlative so far attaches to a light signature, a door motor, a slab of wood — the furniture of a reveal — while the thing the new platform most changed, how it travels down a road, stays unproven until July. So what the panel has really reviewed is Audi's progress, and the honest reading is that it is real but unfinished. The Q9 next door already wears the old badge font; the Q7 shipped a step behind its own sibling.
Audi is finally listening to its customers — it just hasn't caught up to itself.