Audi’s latest concept car is an oversized urban EV that shouldn’t be legal in cities

The Urbanosphere, a massive, fully autonomously people mover that somehow manages to be entirely too large for the streets it is designed to travel, was unveiled by AUDI.

The Urbanosphere was designed for use in traffic-dense Chinese megacities, but is also suitable for any other metropolitan center in the world.

The appearance of its minivan-esque design is misleading. The Urbanosphere is the largest model in the sphere family and of all the concept cars to date.

The dimensions of the vehicle are impressive: 18 feet long, 2.01 meters wide, and 1.78 meters high. The idea of a land yacht steering itself through a dense environment is enough to make even the grizzled urban dweller break out in a cold sweat.

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In dense cities, where vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists intersect with cars, trucks, and buses, larger vehicles have been linked to a rise in injury and death. Recent studies show that cities with more growth in large vehicles have higher rates of pedestrian deaths.

It's hard to know what the designers and engineers at AUDI were thinking when they first sketched out this idea. We should take the company's word that the cavernous interior is a lounge on wheels and a mobile office, and serves as a third living space during the time spent in traffic.

The problem of traffic seems to be getting worse thanks to the SUVs and trucks that are blocking the streets. Vehicles get bigger and the roads stay the same size as traffic is a geometry problem. Congestion becomes unavoidable.

The words "pedestrian" or "cyclist" are not used in the announcement of the Urbanosphere. Eyebrows can translate as turn signals.

This is just a concept, and there is no guarantee that the Urbanosphere will ever be put into production. The upcoming Q9 is expected to be one of the biggest SUVs in the lineup.

The first was a sleek, villainous-looking electric convertible, and the second was the Urbanosphere. The Grandsphere is an electric car that looks like it was designed by a celebrity.

The three-dimensional representation of a ring that is used to describe each of these concepts is called the "sphere" by AUDI.