Audi, your truck is ready

TRUCKING might never be the same after a pair of independent designers from the former Soviet Union set out to pen their take on the highway load lugger of the future.

Although Audi appears to have had nothing to do with it, Antem Smirnov, from Belarus, and Ukrainian Vladimir Panchenko decided to dub their project Truck for Audi, giving each of their designs some hints of the familiar German car company’s styling language, mixed with a large dollop of imagination.

Posting their drawings on the web, the pair said they set out to come up with an electric autonomously driving truck for Audi.

Originally, they had intended to present just one design, but said that because they had been unable to choose the best, they presented both.

The first design, called Plan A, is said to be an electric truck for autonomous highway driving, and clearly the more “Audi” of the two.

Painted in a shiny silver finish, the low-slung vehicle rides on impossibly low-profile tyres, like a 30-tonne A8.

Although the truck’s nose is rather vertical, incorporating a big windscreen, the prime mover and trailer both have aero aids – including side panels that retract for sharp turns – to cut drag.

Plan B is an oil tanker with overtones of Mad Max in its evil matte black finish, red Audi Sport highlights and chunky off-road tyres purportedly from Pirelli.

Instead of relaxing in a climate-controlled cabin, the drivers – two of them – sit in exposed roof-top cockpits, formula one style. Wearing helmets, full-harness seatbelts and jet-fighter pilot breathing apparatus. These drivers are shown gripping race-type steering wheels, presumably meaning the vehicle is not solely self driving.

It does, however, have batteries for electric drive, strapped to the belly of the prime mover by – incongruously – a pair of belts.

The designer even went to the trouble of producing a cutaway sketch of in-wheel electric motor and tyre assembly.

Although the front of the Plan B vehicle is all enclosed for aerodynamic effect, the trailer wheels at the back are exposed in an industrial minimalist macho finish.