New names to make room for EVs
Audi’s compact mid-sized car has been called the A4 for almost thirty years, but you can call that car A5 in the long term. At Audi, the naming of its models is being overhauled. This has everything to do with the arrival of a series of new fully electric models.
Not used to the fact that ‘e-tron’ is the designation for fully electric models and that the E-tron SUV is now called Q8 E-tron? Good, then you can now get used to the next change in the naming of Audi models. Audi CEO Markus Duesmann has told our German colleagues at AutoBild that it keeps all numbers for its fully electric models and that all A’s and Q’s followed by an odd number have a combustion engine.
According to Duesmann, the Audi A4 will soon be a fully electric model. The new Audi A4 with combustion engines, so according to the concept as you know the model now, will be renamed Audi A5. According to the same concept, the Audi A6 with combustion engines will soon be known as the Audi A7. The electric model with which Audi will reply to cars such as the Mercedes-Benz EQE and the yet to be revealed BMW i5 will therefore be called A6. With the A6 e-tron Concept and A6 Avant e-tron Concept, Audi was already looking ahead to those two PPE-based EVs.
What does Audi’s new naming strategy mean for, for example, the current generation Audi A5 (Coupé, Cabriolet and Sportback) and A7 Sportback? That is not yet clear. It is not inconceivable that the models of the A5 family – or at least some of them – will merge with the A4 models that will soon be transformed into A5 and that the A7 Sportback will become a variant of the A6 series, which has been renamed A7. The fact that the A4 will soon become A5 may mean that you can count on new word combinations RS5 Sedan, RS5 Avant and RS7 Avant.
Audi will stick to the e-tron designation. So the electric Audi A4 will soon be called A4 e-tron and the electric A6 will be ‘just’ A6 e-tron. Mercedes-Benz recently indicated that it would eventually stop using its EQ designation, which is used specifically for EVs.
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– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl