Audi has launched the next phase of its product strategy towards 2030 by announcing a complete renaming of its reported models from this year.
When submitting the findings of the Four Rings fiscal report for 2022, which shows 1 614 231 vehicles worldwide of which 118 196 are electric, CEO Markus Duesmann confirmed that 20 new or updated vehicles will be launched in 2025. half of them will be EVs.
What will happen
The importance of this will lead to a restructuring of the name where all the even numbered models – 4, 6 and 8 – will be electric while the odd variants – 3, 5 and 7 – will remain with internal combustion power.
Also read: Audi promises final RS model will be ‘amazing’
This means that the next generation A4 will become the A5 and the A6 the new A7 with the final replacement for the pair unknown.
No details have been given about the “Q” SUV model although it is likely that the same logic will be applied as evidenced by the e-tron becoming last year’s Q8 e-tron.
According to comments made in Germany AutoBild This past weekend, Duesmann said that Ingolstadt would not follow Mercedes-Benz’s example of dropping the e-tron designation after the three-point revealed earlier this year that it would be part of the EQ brand from 2024.
“At Audi, e-tron means 100% electric and it is an established term. We want to keep it,” the former boss of Audi Sport, now Head of Technical Development, Oliver Hoffmann, said in the same interview with the German publication.
He added that “many emotional and high-performance derivatives” of the new A5 and A7 will be brought out, but stopped short of confirming further details.
Know the badge
The newly announced name change six years after introducing a major nomenclature rebranding where the engine displacement indicator is made for a two-digit number indicating the power output, followed by the suffix TFSI, TDI or e-tron.
A move that was not universally accepted, Audi’s former Head of Sales and Marketing, Dietmar Voggenreiter, said that the move would be made as “engine displacement as a performance attribute becomes less important to customers”.
“The clarity and logic of structuring designations according to power output makes it possible to distinguish between different levels of performance,” Voggenreiter said in a statement at the time.
As a refresher, this is what the current name structure means:
- 30: 81-96 kW
- 35: 110-125 kW
- 40: 125-150 kW
- 45: 169-185 kW
- 50: 210-230 kW
- 60: 320-340 kW
- 70: more than 400 kW