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Michael Taylor16 Mar 2018
NEWS

Audi teases Tesla-bashing pure-electric sedan

Flagship four-door coupe from Audi to rival Tesla Model S

Embattled Audi boss Rupert Stadler used today’s annual conference to announce a swooping, sexy battery-electric flagship for the Audi brand that will be on sale by 2020.

The four-door e-tron GT will be sold through the Audi Sport (maiden name: Quattro) high-performance offshoot and will be the Audi brand’s third full EV.

The Audi Sport e-tron GT has already been given the green light for production, based on the platform and electric-vehicle technology of the Audi e-tron and e-tron Sportback crossovers.

“It’s a car that thrills at first glance, a fully electric gran turismo that stands for a new kind of sportiness: the Audi e-tron GT,” said Stadler.

“This highly emotive spearhead from Audi Sport is to be produced at our Böllinger Höfe plant near Neckarsulm as of 2020. This prototype gives you a preview of the world premiere in Brussels this summer.

“It proves that electric drive can also deliver high performance. I am sure this very sporty four-door will certainly have many fans and customers. We will lead our high-performance brand Audi Sport into the electric future with models like this.”

While Stadler was coy on details, sources insist the e-tron GT will use a variant of the e-tron SUV’s asynchronous-motor powertrain, with one electric motor on the front axle and one for each rear wheel.

The e-tron SUV was confirmed for production, yet again, at this month’s Geneva motor show, with the e-tron Sportback crossover following later next year. The four- and five-seat e-tron GT sedan will be larger than both, and roughly the same size as the A8 limousine with sleeker, braver styling.

It will be the flagship of a full line-up of full-EV Audis, which will start from an electrified A3 e-tron and also include a full-size SUV, even larger than the lead-out e-tron.

The e-tron GT will be built at the same low-volume boutique Neckarsulm plant that builds the Audi Sport R8, much to the relief of Audi’s German unions.

Stadler insisted its first e-tron had already promised huge sales in Europe, with the company already taking reservations on the car even though it won’t be in showrooms for a year.

“In some markets, demand for the e-tron has already started: Lots of customers have already reserved this SUV,” he said.

“We have received 3700 reservations from Norway alone. The Audi e-tron stands here as a representative of many more electric cars that we will present to you in the coming years. The Audi e-tron Sportback will follow in 2019.”

Its plant in Gyor, Hungary, will supply the firm’s electric motors, just as it has supplied more than 33 million internal-combustion engines to Audi, Bentley, Porsche and Lamborghini over the last 25 years.

“In the next 25 years, our Hungarian employees will certainly produce just as many electric motors,” Stadler insisted.

But the e-trons aren’t the only zero-emission Audis headed for production, with Audi also confirming a limited number of hydrogen fuel-cell cars for 2020.

The fuel-cell EV, which is a follow up to the 2015 h-tron concept car, should deliver more than 700km of pure electric range, using mostly the same electric motors as its conventional EV stablemates.

But even that will be far from the end of Audi’s EV surge and, with half of its global sales coming from China, it’s giving the Asian powerhouse special attention.

“We will launch 10 new SUV variants to the market, of which we will produce seven locally (in China). Four of them will be fully electric,” Stadler confirmed.

“All of that belongs to our comprehensive market initiative in China until 2022.”

All of Audi’s electric cars will sit on three main chassis platforms. The first will be the e-tron’s pioneering J1 architecture. Its cheaper EVs will use the Volkswagen Group’s high-volume MEB electric architecture (just as the A3 uses the Golf’s MQB platform today), while its higher-priced models will use an architecture jointly developed with (and shared by) Porsche.

“We make electric mobility profitable thanks to unique synergies: on the one hand, with the Modular Electric Toolkit (MEB) that Volkswagen is developing for the compact segment; on the other hand, with our premium-architecture electrification, which we are using for electric vehicles in the mid, upper, and luxury range,” Stadler confirmed.

“Through this cooperation with Porsche, we will reduce development costs by a three-digit million amount.

“By 2025, we will have approximately 20 electrified models in our product offering across the entire portfolio. More than half of them will be fully electric; the others will be plug-in hybrids.

“Furthermore, we will equip all core model series at least with mild hybrids. We already offer cars with electrified drive systems in half of our core model series.”

The Audi-Porsche architecture differs from the MEB in areas meant to deliver extra luxury, speed and grip.

Its battery chemistries will be different to the mainstream Volkswagen-branded EVs, mainly to deliver a lower ride height, a lower floor and a lower centre-of-gravity to improve its handling. It will also be largely aluminium, where the MEB cars will use a steel-alloy mix.

Having a higher-spec chassis for the Volkswagen Group’s higher-cost brands is not a new concept, though, because Porsche and Audi (among others) already share the MLB Evo internal-combustion architecture for cars like the Panamera, the Cayenne, the Q7, the A8, the A7, the A6 and even the A4. The only Volkswagen-branded vehicle to use the MLB Evo will be the upcoming Touareg.

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Written byMichael Taylor
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