The eagle-eyed amongst you will have observed that the brand new Audi Q6 e-tron did away with numbered variant names like 50 quattro and 55 quattro – its two trim ranges are merely referred to as the Q6 e-tron quattro and SQ6 e-tron quattro. That’s by design, as Audi is lastly ditching the complicated nomenclature it has persevered with since 2017.
In response to Auto Categorical, Ingolstadt’s head of EV gross sales and product advertising Florian Hauser mentioned the model is specializing in making it simpler for customers to make their selection. “Once we discuss simplicity we don’t simply speak in regards to the choices and the configuration course of, we’re actually considering of getting the leanest engine programme for the Q6 which nonetheless refers to our buyer calls for.”
Which means that shifting forwards, Audi will probably be providing fewer powertrain choices to negate the necessity for numbers. As an alternative, you get a selection within the variety of pushed wheels (quattro or non-quattro) and one or two energy outputs (Q or S). For example, the common all-wheel-drive Q6 e-tron bears simply the “quattro” badge.
“And if it’s a efficiency mannequin with quattro, then it’s ‘SQ6.’” mentioned Hauser. “If you concentrate on what’s coming subsequent, after we discuss rear-wheel drive it’s only a Q6. For smaller and greater batteries we might take into consideration a suffix behind the ‘6’ – for instance ‘Efficiency.’ And so we don’t want the numbers anymore, so we gained’t present them.”
Audi had already moved in the direction of ditching the numbered naming scheme with the Q8 e-tron, which didn’t bear the differentiating badge on the tailgate. Nonetheless, the variant names had been retained on advertising supplies and configurators – till now, that’s. The corporate can be understood to be eradicating the badges on its inner combustion vehicles as nicely, though whether or not or not this naming scheme will seem elsewhere continues to be being mentioned.
The numbered variant names had been initially meant to maneuver the corporate away from naming its variants based mostly on engine displacement, and had been vaguely based mostly on energy outputs. This mirrored the naming scheme utilized by BMW and Mercedes-Benz, which lengthy since distanced themselves from their displacement-based origins (the BMW 320i, 330i and 330e, for instance, are all powered by 2.0 litre engines).
For example, variants with 30 of their identify made between 81 and 96 kW (109 and 129 hp); these rose in increments of 5 till the quantity 70, which was reserved for vehicles that made greater than 400 kW (536 hp).
As you possibly can think about, this utterly arbitrary manner of delineating variants weren’t very useful for consumers making a choice on which mannequin to purchase. Audi had already ditched the system in sure markets like Malaysia – we retained the earlier displacement-based naming scheme (like 2.0 TFSI), solely utilizing the numbers for EVs just like the Q8 e-tron.
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