A rounded rear end promotes air swirling and creating little eddies, almost clinging to the body and adding drag. That car designers go to the trouble of aerodynamically sculpting rear light clusters shows how it’s worth making even small improvements here.
Especially with EVs, in which aerodynamics play a bigger part in the overall efficiency than in ICE cars, and because more drag doesn’t just add fuel cost but charging time too.
It’s such little details that the old A2 doesn’t have. Its door handles stick out, its windscreen wiper sits above the windscreen edge and there’s (very subtle) body cladding.
Practicality and regulations played their part too. The A2 has a little lip spoiler on its hatch, which could be more efficient if it were bigger, and could extend vertically down the sides of the car too, like the ones they put on the back of lorries.
But that would make rear visibility even worse than it is and could have spoilt the lines of what I think is a very pretty little car. Ditto if the rear lights had been sculpted, rather than shaped to match the body: more efficient, less attractive.
There are things Audi didn’t do at the time, then, that it would feel almost compelled to do today, especially on a car marketed, as the A2 was, as technically clever and uber-efficient.
