Audi Has Been Busy Cooking Up Fully Electric Vehicles
EVs are the future, and Audi isn't about to sit idle and let growing demand pass them by. Here's what the automaker has in store for an electrified future.
1. Brave New World
EV sales, by comparison, don't even come close to making a dent in today's overall automotive market. But considering the challenges they face in making electric vehicles viable for real-world use, automakers are understandably placing a great number of resources into their development. Which, of course, includes Audi. Car & Driver recently sat down with some executives from Audi to find out how they're going to meet their goal of having a third of their global sales going to electric vehicles by the year 2025.
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2. Future Models
Audi's first pair of fully electric vehicles, the e-tron Quattro and e-tron Sportback, are already well into development. Each is currently scheduled to arrive in the U.S. in 2019. Two years later a third e-tron EV is scheduled to hit the market, with many others to follow. Both the e-tron Quattro and Sportback will be assembled in Brussels using Audi's very own battery packs, while future models could share components with Volkswagen's I.D. lineup, according to C&D.
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3. Change in Strategy
Building a next-gen EV requires major changes to current ways of thinking and engineering. For electric vehicles to truly succeed and begin to carve out market share, they have to be built differently. That begins, at least for Audi, by keeping core electric powertrain components in-house. In addition to installing its own motor into EVs, Audi is working on an entirely new data bus layout and inverter, which changes a battery's DC voltage to AC.
“The [inverter] component, from a security point of view, is too important to rely on a Tier 1 supplier,” Siegfried Pint, Audi’s technical director for powertrain development, told C&D. “So we are getting more and more into inverter/power module development. How we do it for the second generation is open, to be honest; but we have to have the ability to develop inverters internally.”
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4. Battery Technology
Nothing, however, stands in the way of mass EV acceptance like battery technology. Range anxiety is a real thing, and people will expect their cars to achieve the same kind of mileage in between "fill-ups" as they do with their current gasoline powered vehicles. Automakers, including Audi, expect solid-state batteries to help solve that problem within three to five years. Until that happens, the emphasis remains on current lithium-ion battery technology. But it's clear that battery technology is advancing at a rapid rate, thanks in part to automakers like Audi.
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5. The Future of EVs
Solid-state batteries carry a number of other advantages as well. Namely, the way they're able to be packaged. Current EVs often have to be designed around battery packs, but that promises to change in the very near future. And that's music to the ears of people who find many electric vehicles to be less than attractive. For an automaker like Audi that prides itself on cutting-edge design and performance, that's obviously a necessity.
“It’s easy to put a battery pack on an SUV; an SUV is huge anyway,” Audi chief designer Marc Lichte told C&D. “In the future, we would like to do a battery-electric car very low—a big challenge, and why the package of the battery is very important.”
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