How would you feel if you’d just taken delivery of a new Audi only to discover it struggles to do more than 30mph, the mirrors shake, the passenger door won’t close properly and every time you stop you have to leave the engine running because if you switch it off it’ll take an expert an hour with a screwdriver to get it going again? The instruments don’t work properly, nor does the air-conditioning, it sounds like a tractor being strangled and the suspension is useless.

You might not be too pleased but Audi, owner of this – the one and only Cross Coupé in the world – is delighted. While a conventional Audi might be easily constructed in a day, this one took a specialist team four consecutive months without a weekend off for good behaviour. It is valued conservatively at more than £1m.

Welcome to the weird and only sometimes wonderful world of the concept car. These days the term “concept car” is almost meaningless. Four years ago Bentley showed a “concept” of a Grand Touring coupé, and a few months later revealed the Continental GT and if you could spot the difference between the two you needed to get out more often.

On the other hand some concepts are so far out they stand less chance of being produced for general release than Mark Oaten’s memoirs. Others are used to test public opinion of a new product, to ease the world into accepting a new design language or to showcase some new technology. And while none will admit it, often as not concepts are shown by manufacturers with no new product on the horizon who need to find a way of keeping their name in the headlines.

And of course what a manufacturer says a concept car represents and what it actually represents are often entirely different. For instance Audi will tell you the Cross Coupé is no more than a “design study” that may or may not have some influence on the look of one or more Audis at some unspecified but definitely distant date in the future.

But if you read between the lines of the official printed blurb, get yourself a few off-the-record comments, measure what’s not specifically denied, look at where such a car would fit into the company’s existing lineup and see who stutters when asked a straight question, a perhaps more accurate picture emerges.

In this case, the Cross Coupé is a small sporting SUV that will go into production within the next couple of years to rival, among others, the BMW X3 and Land Rover’s Freelander 2.

It will be positioned below not only the extant and vast Q7, but also the mid-sized Q5 that will be launched this time next year.

Indeed the Cross Coupé would in an ideal world be called the Q3 but Nissan owns the rights to all names beginning with a Q and ending in a number and had agreed to let Audi use only the Q5 and Q7.

Whatever it ends up being called, as a concept the Cross Coupé is extremely exciting because it represents something genuinely new in the class. At the moment small SUVs tend to look either like genuine off-roaders or merely jacked-up hatchbacks with four-wheel drive and some chunky body add-ons.

Audi’s idea is to create the silhouette of a coupé, use four frameless doors to maintain the illusion and build it as an SUV. The result is a car with the presence and elevated driving position of a proper off-roader, but such a sleek shape the rear window is even more steeply raked than the windscreen.

This brings problems, such as limited boot space, but nothing the fashion-hungry buyers Audi has in mind for the car are going to concern themselves with for a minute. They’ll be much too busy congratulating themselves for buying a car that looks so sporting yet still lets them look down on their neighbours.

You have also to question whether Audi would bother to equip the car with its latest running gear, electronics and technology were it not entirely serious about putting it into production.

Sure, certain features such as the silk-lined seats, hugely complex 20in chrome and gold wheels, alabaster leather upholstery and flawless liquid silver paint are unlikely to prove practical production propositions but Audi is rightly proud of its reputation for bringing concept cars to market in scarcely diluted form (see how little the R8 supercar differs from its Le Mans concept and you’ll see what I mean), so my guess is that its basic shape and architecture are what will be appearing in your local Audi showroom sometime in 2010.

That means a car that seems to borrow elements from SUV, coupé and hatchback design and combine them into a surprisingly harmonious whole. On that score alone its likely appeal in the marketplace is pretty evident.

The Cross Coupé is pretty smart beneath the skin, too. Power comes from a new 2 litre four-cylinder diesel with an outstanding 204bhp output and claimed 47.9mpg consumption.

It runs through a four-wheel-drive system that in adverse conditions constantly channels power to those tyres with the most grip while gearchanges come and go in milliseconds. In theory at least: because this car is a concept, it need not actually do any of these things.

Still I hope that the clever new dual entertainment screen makes it through to the showroom. This allows those in the front to see different things on the same screen.

So if you’re the passenger, you can watch the same movie as the children sitting in the back, while if the driver looks at the same screen, because he or she is viewing from a different angle, the film will be invisible and instead there will be, for instance, the navigation map.

I drove the Cross Coupé and, like every other concept I’ve driven, it was awful. Read nothing into this: the real purpose of the Cross Coupé is to provide a looking glass to not only a new sort of Audi but to what the company insists is a new class of car. With quite a few provisos, I think it may be right.

Vital statistics Audi Cross Coupé
Model Engine type 1968cc, four cylinders
Power/Torque 204bhp / 295 lb ft
Transmission Six-speed automatic
Fuel/CO2 47.9mpg (combined) / n/a
Performance n/a
Price £30,000-£40,000 approx
Verdict Only a concept but it promises much
Rating
Date of release 2010

The opposition

Model Land Rover Freelander 2 £20,960-£34,095
For Good looking, fine to drive on road and excellent in mud
Against Lacks a third row of seats, strange steering, expensive

Model BMW X3 £30,915-£38,665
For Punchy, frugal engines, good to drive on road, spacious interior
Against Looks odd, harsh ride, steep pricing

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