A Sheet of Glass Learned to Darken Itself, and the Pull-Down Blind Died Where It Hung. Declare the Mourning.

Because a flagship exists to send its wonders trickling downward into humbler rooms, Audi has lifted the Digital Matrix light built for its first-ever flagship SUV, the Q9, and set it into the third-generation Q7, the car that seats seven, takes three child seats abreast in the second row, and carries the crumbs of the soccer team home in the third.

In doing so it has quietly killed something and buried it without a word. The panoramic roof, switching from transparent to opaque across nine segments and blocking, Audi says, more than 99.5 percent of ultraviolet light, has rendered the pull-down blind obsolete, and Audi's own release confirms the death in the flattest voice a sentence can hold: a conventional blind is no longer necessary. As though the flimsy accordion sunshade, the last honest object on the sun-flap, a thing that has shaded a child's eyes since before these engineers were born, could be retired in the passive voice of a spec sheet. It cannot. Declare the mourning.

Consider what buried it. For the first time, Audi says, U.S. owners are offered the Digital Matrix LED headlight with its micro-LED modules, arriving not in some cloistered coachbuilt jewel but in the school-run hauler assembled in Bratislava. Overhead, a Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystal layer, 78 LEDs, laminated glass that turns itself opaque the instant the Q7 is parked so no stranger may peer in at the booster seats. It is exquisite. It is also an executioner, and it swings above the juice box in the door bin.

An algorithm would log the blind's death under obsolescence and never grieve a small pleated thing that stood between the afternoon sun and a sleeping child for a generation. Human hands hung that blind, and human hands should bury it. So hear the sentence of this court: nine days of mourning, one for each segment of the glass that replaced it, black crepe over every accordion shade in the atelier, the workshop lights held at half, and an apprentice sent each dawn to raise and lower a single surviving pull-down blind by hand until the ninth morning, that the craft may watch, once more, a thing obey a finger and mean it. Mourning declared.