Could a Luxury Car Brand like Audi get into Fitness Equipment?

Luxury car brands don’t sell transportation… they sell a lifestyle, so what if you carried that idea to any other category? Designer Qingsheng Meng asked themself the same question, wondering what would happen if you took a luxury car brand like Audi’s DNA and applied it to another category, for example, exercise equipment. Sure, it sounds odd on the face of it, but Bose makes speakers and truck seats. Yamaha makes motorcycles and pianos… so why couldn’t Audi make a stationary exercise bike? After all, the company already builds electric bicycles, so the transition seems like a natural one. Meet the Audi Smart Spinning Bike, an exercise bike built with Audi’s luxury automotive DNA. After all, luxury car brands sell a lifestyle – why not a healthy one?

Designer: Qingsheng Meng

The Audi Smart Spinning Bike concept carries the company’s automotive aesthetic to home workout equipment. This translates to clean surfaces, chiseled forms, a forward-leaning stance that indicates speed, and a gorgeous matte black and silver colorway that adds to the bike’s appeal. “Different from traditional spinning bikes, this product intelligentizes traditional spinning bikes,” says Meng, the China-based designer responsible for the Audi Smart Spinning Bike concept. “At the same time, it uses simple styling techniques to draw lessons from Audi’s design language, emphasizing Audi’s intelligent and simple brand attributes, and is in line with the market.”

The spin-bike is different from Peloton or any of the other stationary bikes you’d otherwise see. It looks different, feels much more advanced, and comes with features that set it in a class apart. The bike sports an adjustable frame, that lets you manipulate the seat distance, height, or even handlebar heights with the simple push of a button. A dashboard gives you a comprehensive breakdown of your workout, and the energy that you put into the exercise doesn’t go to waste. It charges the e-bike as well as a detachable power bank that sits underneath the dashboard, giving you actual battery power that you can then use to charge your smartphone or other devices around the house.

The handlebars facilitate a sturdy grip while cycling, and a touchscreen LCD dashboard lets you brows through your workout stats, giving you a comprehensive breakdown of how long you cycled, how many calories you burned, your cadence, cardio, etc. The dashboard also lets you choose difficulty settings before each workout. Meanwhile, your exercise doesn’t go in vain – the muscular energy you exert during cycling gets converted into kinetic energy, which then gets stored as electrical energy in a battery pack attached to the base of the handlebars.

With the ability to hold as many as two battery packs, the Audi Smart Spinning Bike gives you impetus to exercise, also allowing you to measure your workout in a unique way. You can compare a single exercise session to literal milli-amp hours, understanding how much physical exertion you’d need to charge your entire smartphone from 0 to 100! Sounds fun, doesn’t it??

It’s precisely that fun that helps the Audi Smart Spinning Bike stand apart from other stationery bikes, that just provide you with ‘exercise’. Quite like how Audi cars are fun to ride and immerse you in the luxurious thrill of style and speed, the spin bike helps elevate your workout to another level, giving you the kind of workout you could only experience from a state-of-the-art bike designed by one of the world’s leading automotive marques!