Audi MMI System Review

At the 2010 Detroit Auto Show, Cars.com's Kelsey Mays takes a look at Audi's MMI system.

Audi MMI System Review Hi! I’m Kelsey Mays for Cars.com. We’re at the Detroit Auto Show, checking out Audi’s latest MMI system. MMI stands for Multi-Media Interface, and it comprises this knob here, which is used to control the car’s navigation and entertainment functions, not unlike BMW’s iDrive, and Mercedes’ Command Systems do in their cars. MMI is set to roll out in the 2011 A8, the latest version of it, anyway, and Audi will probably roll it out in other cars thereafter. We’re going to take you through how it works. Like before, MMI includes four buttons here that correspond to inputs on the menu. The radio and media buttons have kind of been moved over here to the right, arranged a little more logically. But the big news is this new thump pad. It sits to the left of the main knob. The thumb pad uses black panel technology, and so most of the time it shows just your six radio station pre-sets. But it can also revert to a completely blank panel, and you can do things, like, write your destinations in for the navigation system. It’s pretty easy to use if you’ve ever used a stylus for your PDA, for example. It picked up most of my letters, though it didn’t get all of them all the time. Still easier to use than the knob in putting letters manually, which you can still do if you want to do that. Almost as easy as actually having a touch screen and throwing them on yourself. Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to be able to do that. Like on a PDA, deleting what you just wrote is as simple as putting in a backspace dash here. Not as easy to put in a forward space, because when you do that, it thinks that you’re actually putting in a dash, so you have to go to a separate screen to do that. The pad doubles as a map scroller, if you want to look around where you are. It used to be a little joystick atop of this MMI knob. This is far easier than that. It’s also got some cool freehand functions here. You can navigate a DVD menu or flip through your uploaded albums, like, on an iPhone. Press play in the A8, it can play them on a superb Bang and Olufsen stereo. It almost could make Fallout Boy sound good. No, it can’t do that. The touch pad doesn’t work for everything. You can’t zip through some of these submenus on it. You still have to use the MMI knob here for a lot of that stuff. Audi says it wanted to keep the six-radio presets on this pad most of the time. The graphics of this system, overall, are top-notch. But that no longer sets a carmaker apart, especially here, because Command and iDrive both have pretty good graphics, too. The Command still seems a little bit more intuitive. Still, Audi definitely gets style points for having this touch pad. Once you get the hang of it, it works pretty easy.