Audi's drop-top SUV concept could've been a stylish Evoque alternative

This is the Audi Cross Cabrio quattro concept – just saying the car's name takes longer than an average UK summer. It was revealed at the Los Angeles motor show in November 2007, so just in time for the summer, if you lived in Australia.

Neither, actually – this is one of the cars that forced the murky shades of grey that we’re now forced to operate in, it’s a crossover cabrio, if you will. It’s bigger than it looks, too – at 4.6m long and 1.9m wide it’s 40cm longer than the A3 of the time and 15cm wider. That’s because it was meant to show us a cheeky glimpse at a larger upcoming SUV that Audi was working on. Can you guess which one?

We’re very glad that you asked – Audi described the 17 seconds it took to stow the Z-folding roof on the Cross Cabrio quattro concept as “spectacularly brief”. The multilayer fabric number was said to be comparable to a standard steel roof in its insulating ability, ensuring it could be driven all year round in all weathers.

Audi made quite the fuss about the Cross Cabrio quattro’s go-anywhere ability – while the 21-inch alloy wheels don’t look like the ideal companion for a day of greenlaning, there’s a full-width underbody guard, a mechanical centre-differential looking after the full-time 4WD and electric ride height adjustment that could pop the car up or down 40mm. 

Back when the Cross Cabrio was revealed we still lived in the heady, optimistic days when diesel was the future. Remember those? The memories might have gone hazy, but that’s just the particulate fumes. Under the bonnet of this drop-top was a longitudinally mounted 3.0-litre diesel producing 240bhp and 369lb ft of torque, good for a probably-decent-for-the-time-who-knows 39mpg. 

Eurgh, white leather? What kind of fantasy land were these people living in? There were other crazy things – a space-age satnav system using Google Earth, LED headlights… wait, these were just things you’d get on a normal car. There was one cool feature we’d like to see on a production cabriolet – each occupant in the Cross Cabrio got a microphone and speaker next to their seat that filtered out background noise to aid conversation. It would have been like a family Zoom call, but in person.

Save for a gang of villagers with flaming pitchforks held aloft descending on Audi’s Ingolstadt headquartes and demanding a production run of crossover convertibles, the Cross Cabrio’s main purpose was really to tease the upcoming 2008 Q5 (did you guess that one? No, us neither) – because what says five-door small family SUV more than a two-door crossover cabriolet concept car? Which, when all is said and done, is quite the shame, because we’d far rather have one of these than a Range Rover Evoque and that car has gone down quite the treat in parts of Cheshire and west London.

Don’t worry, because the Volkswagen Group has just the car for you. Clearly Audi buyers weren’t up for the social challenge of having to explain exactly why they were driving a soft-top crossover, but Volkswagen’s hardy customers wouldn’t let a thing like a horrendous lack of style or appeal stop them. The T-Roc convertible has been quite the sales smash, taking a quarter of total T-Roc sales in its home market of Germany.