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Those of us used to the humongous Audi stands at the Frankfurt Motor Show got a bit of a shock when we arrived in Detroit - the Audi area at the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) is surprisingly small, humble even. Audi is not for hiding its light under a bushel, though - in an attempt to shrug off its complicity in the Volkswagen diesel-gate scandal, the German brand is showing of a futuristically fuelled hydrogen concept.
On the outside, the h-tron quattro (lower-case letters sic erat transcriptum...) doesn't look very much different to the all-battery-powered e-tron quattro concept shown in Frankfurt last year. Both share the same MLB platform underneath and the styling of both will eventually morph into Audi's sporty large SUV, and BMW X6 rival, the Q6.
What's interesting here is underneath - there you'll find a fuel cell stack, which draws on the combined 6kg of hydrogen stored in two high-pressure tanks. That stack can develop up to 110kw, or around 150hp, and it's backed up by a hybrid battery stack, which provides an additional 136hp. Both of those power sources drive two electric motors - a 123hp unit on the front axle and a 190hp unit on the rear axle, for a combined 285hp, or the same as Audi's current V6 turbo diesel engine (but significantly less than the 500hp boasted by the e-tron battery version, and the boot is also slightly smaller because of the need to package the hydrogen fuel tanks).
Audi claims sub-seven-second 0-100km/h times, and a top speed of 200km/h. More importantly, topping off the hydrogen tanks takes just 4 minutes (compared to a minimum 15-30 minutes needed to bring the battery version back up to 80 per cent power). Total fuel range is claimed to be close to 600km.
If nothing else, it proves that Audi is now as serious as Mercedes, Toyota, Honda and Hyundai at getting a hydrogen fuelled car into production. We know that the underpinnings of the h-tron concept are production ready (it's basically a mix of current Q7 and next-gen Q5 under there) although we don't expect that the autonomous driving package on show in Detroit (which only works at speeds of up to 60km/h anyway) will be quite ready to go when the rest of the car is.
When will that be? Audi's being cagey for now but 2020, two years after the all-electric e-tron version, has been tentatively pencilled in.