Went to the local delaership today and got to see a Q7 up close for the first time. I will be driving one on saturday because Audi has a local test drive event so I will post my driving impressions then but now I will talk about the looks....

Exterior:
The car actually looks better in person than in all the pics we have seen. It is pretty large, but doesn't show it's size too much. The front is huge and very tall. I would call the design beautiful, it's more agressive and mean than anything else. Body panels looked to have a nice fit, and the rear also wasn't as bad as it looks in pictures. It flowed pretty well. There was one problem, I tried to open the rear hatch, and tha automatic hatch just stopped moving half way up and wouldn't budge. I ducked under and pressed the automatic close button and it slammed shut, wasn't very graceful.... Second time I tried it though it worked fine... The LED's on the mirrors looked very cool and well-intergrated.

Interior:
It was a black on black interior and looked pretty nice. I did find cost cutting spots though... The dash is very deep but half of it instead of being the soft touch vinyle is hard plastic that when you touch it moves and if you knock on it sounds very hollow. Also the bottom pasrt of the dash is hard plastic and the spot where your right leg rsts on if you are the driver is flimsy and also hollow sounding... the other thing was the b-pilar covers felt cheap and also hollow. For the most part though everything was pretty good. The panorama roof was amazing and let a lot of light in and made the interior fell roomy. The 2nd rown seats had a good amount of leg room also. The car was also equipped with the blid spot monitoring system which looked pretty neat.

MMI:
The screen wasn't that big but the interface looked nice, but it didn't run as smoothly as I expected. It was choppy at times and didn't record smoothly my movements of the knob. I found it a little tedious also to use, but that is to be expected since it was my first time and I didn't have a manual. The knob itself and all the buttons were solid.

Well that is all for now, I will give you my driving impressions this weekend.

Waiting for a review with pictures.

Great so far... photos needed asap.

I'm quite surprised about the interior quality lapse - well, I think in general, SUVs have rather bad interiors - or at least worse than their sedan counterparts, don't you think? I'm thinking because there's so much space to fill, engineers have a hard time balancing cost & quality to make everything feel good.

About the automatic boot closer, I think it's a normal fault. It's the same on our Phaeton - if a person opens the boot while the hydraulics are activated, air would be lost and there wouldn't be enough pressure to push up the boot fully. If you try again without disturbing the process however, there should be no faults.