This was the future once

Audi's A2 was seen as being ahead of its time when it arrived in 1999. Was it? New A2 owner MATT PRIOR looks at this innovator through a 2025 lens

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One of the things people love to say about the Audi A2 is that it was ahead of its time. It’s the opinion people seem to hold most about the small Audi.

And I get that: if you pulled the wraps from it today, it would still look modern. In October last year, Audi did just that, when it revealed the A2 E-tron concept restomod to celebrate the car’s 25th anniversary, and it looked as fresh as a piglet.

But if the A2 was ‘ahead of its time’, it must still be a long, long way ahead of its time, because more than a quarter of a century after it was launched, the world is not oversupplied with compact aluminium four-seaters that weigh less than 900kg and measure 3.8m long.

No, instead the family car market is filled with very un-A2ish things: steel, heavy and crossovery. Influentially, and financially, the Audi A2 was a dead end. Audi sold just 176,000 of them globally over five years, at a time when Ford was selling 125,000 Focuses, in the UK alone, every year.

The car that has come closest to following it, spiritually, was perhaps the BMW i3. BMW sold fewer than 25,000 of those a year too.