NVES vs RS: Audi says emissions rules won’t kill its top performers

While much noise has been made about the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard (NVES) and its hugely punishing fines for carmakers who breach CO2 emissions limits, Audi’s Australian arm says it’s not too concerned about its ability to stay on the green side of the NVES ledger, and that for the time being, its turbo-petrol performance beasts aren’t going anywhere.

At Audi’s swish launch party for its 2026 Formula One debut, the company slipped the covers off the first example of its scorching-hot RS5 to touch Aussie soil.

With a twin-turbocharged petrol-gargling V6 under the bonnet and a massive 470kW/825Nm at the disposal of the driver’s right ankle, one might be forgiven for thinking it’s already living on borrowed time.

After all, Australia has now entered its second year of NVES, a scheme that financially penalises automakers who fail to keep the average CO2 emissions of the vehicles they sell below a certain limit.

With the rear of the new RS5 dominated by two massive oval tailpipes, it’s a machine that can generate a lot of CO2.

“We’re looking at progressively migrating our model strategy to speak to NVES,” Audi Australia head of product Matt Dale said.

“But also, we’ll still offer cars like the RS Q8 Performance. We can offset those with – take our Q5 PHEV (plug-in hybrid) as an example – because for every one of those [sold], we can sell almost 2.5 [RS Q8s].

“That works in our favour, and having such a broad model portfolio, we can pivot around that.

“That’s what we’re constantly analysing and keeping a very close eye on, how that transitions over time as the NVES headline targets get stricter throughout the coming years.”

In 2025, the headline CO2 limit for passenger cars and non-ladder-frame SUVs was 141 grams per kilometre, a number that Audi was able to stay on the right side of by selling enough of its e-tron battery-electric models (BEVs) and PHEV variants of the A5, Q5, and Q8.

Even so, the brand’s EVs accounted for 9.89 per cent of its sales total last year, which provided enough carbon offsets to give it 21,780 NVES credits to either trade with other automakers or keep to offset future emissions liabilities.

However, rival BMW – a brand with far more EV products on offer – generated more than 15 times that number of credits over the same period.

Audi will need to do more to stay in front of NVES as the headline emissions target ratchets lower in coming years and heads toward its eventual target of just 58g/km in 2029. Expanding BEV sales will be necessary to meet that 2029 target, but PHEVs are still going to be critical in the interim.

“With NVES (2025 performance), we only launched our plug-in hybrid A5 toward the end of the year, and plug-in hybrid Q5 was an outgoing model, and we’ve got the new one coming very shortly. They will obviously help,” product manager Peter Strudwicke said.

And perhaps surprisingly, the RS5 will be part of that solution. With the new-generation, the nameplate shifts from pure combustion power to being a PHEV, with an EV range of 84km (WLTP).

With average CO2 emissions of just 102g/km, the 2026 Audi RS5 is actually NVES-compliant until the start of 2027, with each one sold helping Audi balance its 2026 emissions ledger.

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