Saar: Due to the diesel scandal currently plaguing the automaker, the Audi Summit has been indefinitely postponed.
Few will believe that the most important car that Audi planned to unveil and launch this year was the Q8 SUV. But ask anyone from the company itself and they will, in all probability, say it is the e-Tron. Why? That’s simple. The e-Tron will become Audi’s first-ever pure electric vehicle. The entire world was waiting to see the finished product, which was scheduled to be unveiled on August 30, 2018, at the Audi Summit. But that is not going to happen. Audi has confirmed that the Audi Summit has been indefinitely postponed and will take place sometime later this year.
The confirmed later date is yet to surface. But the country where the rescheduled Audi Summit will take place will, in all likelihood, be the USA. The delay has come due to the diesel scandal that has been plaguing the automaker. So much so that its former CEO, Rupert Stadler, was taken into custody a couple of weeks ago due to concerns that he may suppress evidence regarding ongoing criminal investigations. Audi’s parent company, Volkswagen Group, has been facing the grunt of the diesel scandal for a while now and has already moved over 26 billion USD in damages. Presently, Germany’s transport authority, KBA, is investigating 20 current or former Audi employees, which includes Stadler.
Audi did confirm that the sales of the e-Tron will go ahead as originally scheduled. In Europe, they are slated to begin before the end of this year. That means its global unveiling should take place before that. But Audi’s target of becoming the first German automaker to launch a fully-electric SUV could topple as Mercedes-Benz will be unveiling the production-spec of its EQC SUV on September 4, 2018, in Stockholm, Sweden. BMW’s answer to the EQC and the e-Tron will come in the form of the iX3, which is scheduled for market launch in 2020.
There is no other way to put it: the e-Tron is a cornerstone for Audi’s future electric vehicles. It is expected to take charge of Audi’s ambitions of retailing 800,000 electrified cars annually by 2025. To reach that target, Audi will be injecting at least one kind of electrified powertrain in all its models by the said year.
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