Audi’s engineers were testing a prototype of the 2019 A7 in the Austrian Alps, when suddenly the car caught fire in front of our spy’s camera.



Apparently this Audi A7 mule suffered from some sort of catastrophic failure while pulling a dead weight trailer up the Alps and flames started shooting from between the hood and the windshield.

Once the flames were spotted, Audi’s engineers pulled over and managed to get all of their things out of the car in time. A roadside service employee tried to put the fire out with a handheld extinguisher but this wasn’t enough to stop the flames from devouring the prototype.

The fire required only 15 to 20 minutes to completely destroy the car, with the fire department showing up and extinguishing the fire. Luckily, no one was hurt.

An incident like this is a stark reminder of the development testing’s importance, as it allows carmakers to pinpoint possible faults of their new models, before they launch them into the market.

The upcoming 2019 Audi A7 will be based on the latest and much lighter MLB-Evo platform that is already used in models such as the Q7. Its design will reportedly be heavily inspired by the Audi Prologue Concept but we’ll have to wait until the end of the year at least to see if this is true.

Photo Credits: CarPix for CarScoops

PHOTO GALLERY