Audi goes electric

If things have seemed a little quiet at Ingolstadt lately, they won’t stay that way for long, with Audi set to fire in a volley of new electrified cars.

The other Bavarian premium car-maker is about to replace five of its mainstream models as well as add two new Q-badged SUVs and three all-electric e-tron cars.

On top of all that, it insists it will have a small production run of fully autonomous cars ready by 2021.

Crunched by the four-cylinder and V6 versions of the Dieselgate crisis for the past year, Audi chairman Rupert Stadler would now prefer people to look forward.

That might be wishful thinking, in part, because Munich’s prosecutors raided Audi’s Ingolstadt headquarters on the morning of its annual conference last month, even parking in Stadler’s personal parking space. In a BMW, no less.

“We are rejuvenating our model portfolio enormously and will renew five existing core model series by mid-2018,” Stadler said overnight.

“In addition, we will expand our successful Q family by 2019 with two new concepts – the Audi Q8 [pictured] and the Audi Q4 – and we will launch our battery-electric e-tron models.”

It will have three electric or electrified models on sale by 2020, two of which come off the C-BEV architecture it developed in house for higher-riding SUVs and one off the Porsche-developed J1 platform.

Audi will also electrify its full core model range with both plug-in hybrid (PHEV) and battery-electric (BEV) models as each new product cycle rolls through.

The first of those will be the A8, which Audi will unveil in Barcelona on July 11, and which promises both plug-in hybrid and Level 3 autonomous capability.

The A7 will follow soon after, on the same architecture, and Stadler promised that at least 30 per cent of the brand’s sales will be electrified (either BEV or PHEV) by 2025.

That’s up to double what BMW is quoting, with the Group’s chairman Harald Kruger cautioning its EV model mix will be anywhere between 15 and 25 per cent.

While it is sharing the electric architecture development with Porsche, Audi has been nominated the Volkswagen Group’s centre of development for autonomous driving.