According to Reuters, a report from German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung says that Audi CEO Markus Duesmann made comments to upper officials in the carmaker’s ranks that it will end production of cars with internal combustion engines by 2026—including hybrid models—and instead switch to an all-electric lineup.
[The new Audi e-tron GT | Faster than a Porsche Taycan?]
Do you think higher-end brands like …
1. That Audi is gorgeous.
2. I think higher-end brands such as that will definitely have an easier time selling these cars. People that can afford a $140K car often also have houses and can have the garage wired for the proper voltage to charge (if it isn't already). People like me that can afford a 20K car will be going for an off-lease Ford Maverick instead. People in my income bracket also often live in apartments and have no real manner to charge electric cars (we run an extension cord out of our bedroom window to charge our plug in Prius). Until chargers are more prevalent, it'll be more difficult for folks like me to own and charge an EV.
3. I think in the next 5 years we're going to see a lot of new EVs coming out. Perhaps we'll see some more affordable ones? I've read that Elon Musk has commented several times that he'd like to do a cheaper Tesla, set below the model 3.
Battery prices are dropping, volumes are going up. EVs are going to drop in price.
EV2go is aiming at the "can't charge at home" demographic. On-street charging is already a thing, they're also addressing places you'd be going anyway like malls and movie theaters (remember those?). It'll take a while to get that infrastructure built up but of course it'll take a while for the fleet to change to EV even if not a single ICE car is sold after today.
Man Audi is pulling all the stops in looks. It's not shocking all the luxury makers are going electric.
In reply to infinitenexus :
Yeah supposedly there's a model 2 in the works- a small hatch that he claims will be less than ~$25K but that depends on the 4680 cell.
"Cheapening" EVs is going to be very interesting in the coming years, since so much revolves around how you build cells, what chemistries you use and how you cool them.
There has to be a "but" or an "except in this case" built in there somehow. It just seems like corporate suicide to me.
Remind me to check in 2028 if this happened.
Audi I can see. Now if VW did this that would be a game changer and most likely kill them as a brand.
I do a ton of work for housing authority and apartment complex's and the like. I also do lots of work in the urban areas of the city of Boston where the "regular" folks live. Like Dorchester or Roxbury MA. There is no way they can put the infrastructure in place in these locations to alow for electric cars. It will just not work.
This is a typical street: (I am actually working on a building one block over just like these)
If they do install chargers when the local's figuar out that there is copper in the cables of the chargers those will be stolen.
Electric cars are only going to work for the upper-middle class. For those "nice" sleepy towns west of Boston where the median income is over 100K.
Instead of pounding forward with this stuff more needs to be done to facilitate better safer and affordable transportation for the urban areas around citys. You talk electric vehicles to people in these locations and they think you are a complete idiot and they get aggravated as they feel like they re getting left behind. Billions in electric car development for the afluent privileged few being touted as the game changer for all when in fact it really will only work for a very specific segment of the population. I am not a huge fan of linkage type funding but I think that for every dollar that is given by the state and feds to people as rebates for there electric car purchase an equal amount needs to be invested in public transportation.
That seems like a really really fast change over. I doubt they have the will to hit that.
I'll admit to being intrigued enough by the looks of the Taycan (especially the Cross Turismo) and the Audi GT that I've been considering them as (much, much, much) more practical replacements for the i8.
They are heavy though. I'd seen the numbers, but on viewing some assembly videos on YouTube where the massive size of the brakes is apparent, I just don't know if I'm ready to accept a "sporty" 5,000 pound vehicle.
I'm going to miss the warm amber glow of an Audi CEL. Coolant temperature sensor and coil pack manufacturers are going to be in trouble.
In reply to captdownshift (Forum Supporter) :
You are underestimating the ability of German engineers to create complexity out of simplicity.
Karacticus said:I'll admit to being intrigued enough by the looks of the Taycan (especially the Cross Turismo) and the Audi GT that I've been considering them as (much, much, much) more practical replacements for the i8.
They are heavy though. I'd seen the numbers, but on viewing some assembly videos on YouTube where the massive size of the brakes is apparent, I just don't know if I'm ready to accept a "sporty" 5,000 pound vehicle.
EV brakes are a bit of a weird thing. Regen means that the brakes actually get very little use in normal driving. But the mass of the vehicle and (more importantly) the sheer acceleration capability means that when they work the brakes hard, they work the brakes REALLY hard. I suspect Audi has some sort of internal metric for brake capacity that is tied to acceleration.
Demands on the brakes scale lineararily with vehicle mass but with the square of the velocity change, so fast is more of a problem than heavy.
I agree that these new electric cars are cool, super fast and futuristic. But I have still not had anyone intelligently answer the question of where all the clean electricity comes from for all these electric cars? If manufacturer's such as Audi switch over by 2026, that may work for their expensive limited sales (186,620 in 2020) sitting in their private garages with access to fast chargers but how does this scale to much larger manufacturers? There will need to be a ton of electric power plants built in the coming years, we are not going to power these new cars on windmills and solar alone. Certainly the infrastructure to support all this new electric demand does not currently exist in a form that would support a quick transition from gas to electric. From a pure energy in - energy out point of view, all the energy required to move a car from point A to point B at a given speed is the same whether the vehicle is electric or gas powered. So the electric grid will need to accommodate the energy currently used to power the millions of cars and trucks on the road driven daily. So, while the rush to an all electric car world is in full swing with many manufacturers, no one seems to be talking about where the electricity comes from?
People are talking about that, yes. It's pretty easy to find articles addressing it, such as this one from Autoweek.
Keep in mind that EVs tend to charge at times when the grid is underutilized. Owners are incentivized to do this by peak surcharges, you simply tell your car to charge between X and Y times to minimize your electric bill and your utility says "thank you!". They can even be used to smooth out demand peaks if they are connected to the grid, so they can actually take a load off the grid. Power plants are happiest when they're putting out nice consistent levels. So of all the problems facing EVs, that's actually one of the smaller ones.
Keep in mind that power generation is not x MW per day, it's up to x MW at any given time. Using power at night does not affect the amount of power available during the day.
How to pay for road infrastructure, that's a lot harder because it's political instead of technical.
Well, even if you believe that the current grid can handle an all electric car conversion (which I don't believe), the current grid is certainly not powered by clean energy. According to the EIA, 60% of electrical production is from fossil fuels, 20% is nuclear and the remaining 20% is wind/hydro/solar. Personally, I wish that the transition would be slower by the manufacturers, but now that I work from home and will probably for the rest of my working life, guess I won't be in the market for a new electric car anyway.
Why would the current grid have to handle it? An all electric car fleet isn't going to happen overnight - see the recent thread on the fact that the average age of the US fleet is 12 years. So it's not today's grid that we need to worry about, it's the grid a few decades down the road. And good news, we have a few decades to build that grid gradually.
Electrical energy production doesn't have to 100% clean to be better than a quarter billion mobile point sources that are always in transitional states. It's a lot easier to clean up a fossil fuel plant that runs at a steady state than all the cars it could potentially fuel.
Right, based on the article Colin posted, some stuff got lost in translation. Here's a link to what I think might be the original article in German.
What that article states - at least when I skimmed over it - is that from about the middle of this decade, the A3 and A4 won't be available anymore in their current from (which seems to be taken as "no diesel or gas engined variants"), and that in about a decade, one would only be able to buy battery electric cars from Audi.
They author also appears to speculate that part of the driver behind this might be to get over the reputational damage from Dieselgate.
Since we're talking about luxury brands and EVs, I'm curious when Porsche will switch the 911 over to electric. I know it'll happen at some point, but I believe there will be a huge outcry, even though the car will likely be a performance monster. So much of the 911 magic is based on that flat 6.
Although then again, Porsche purists screamed when Porsche came out with a *gasp* SUV, and then it became their top-selling vehicle. So we'll see.
I've also read that Lamborghini is planning on going fully electric soon.
In reply to infinitenexus :
the 911 won't until WEC/IMSA and all the various GT/GTE/GTS/GTSE etc. classes change the rules to either require electric or that going electric provides a competitive advantage within them.
Some screen captures of Taycan and Etron GT brakes.
I wonder how the gas station industry will change in the next two decades. Will they gradually add a few electric charging stations, while also turning their "convenience store" model into a "well you gotta wait at least 15 minutes for a charge so let's make this a fast food restaurant as well" model? How long would it be until they are just charging stations? Will they stubbornly cling to only offering gasoline to the remaining cars that need it? Obviously that will be okay for a while, but hypothetically not forever. Will they have to start offering refueling options for hydrogen or other alternative fuel cars?
In reply to slowbird :
If they are like some of the gas stations around here, they may want to maintain some nominal status of continuing to operate as gas stations to avoid needing to remove the tanks and mitigate any accumulated contamination.
I think this is an incredibly bold move. Audi sells plenty of cars that are around $50k, not $140k. The infrastructure and battery charge times still don't exist to truly make electric cars a replacement for ICE cars. (I know you disagree with me Keith!)
The whole "green" thing is a complete boondoogle for me. The electric cars are far dirtier to make, requiring heavy metals, they're far dirtier to scrap and they still ultimately get their juice from fossil fuels...
The number one thing that takes out high end Euro cars is expensive, hard to trouble shoot electronics. The same guys who can't make a HVAC controller or electric window regulator live past warranty are going to be making all electric drive trains. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ..... Seriously, this is comedy gold!
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