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Audi accelerates transformation and aims to demonstrate sustainable premium mobility

As the pace of change in society has increased, the VW subsidiary is also accelerating and aims to advance even more swiftly in the transition to electric drive.

Transformation of the Rings: Under its new head Markus Duesmann, the Audi brand is increasingly becoming the radical driver of change within the VW Group and plans to make further adjustments. | Photo: Audi
Transformation of the Rings: Under its new head Markus Duesmann, the Audi brand is increasingly becoming the radical driver of change within the VW Group and plans to make further adjustments. | Photo: Audi
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Johannes Reichel

The Ingolstadt-based Volkswagen subsidiary Audi continues to forge ahead within the Group and has now announced a further intensification of its drive transformation. "The pace of change in our society is accelerating rapidly. Therefore, we are accelerating our transformation," explained Audi CEO Markus Duesmann. A few weeks ago, it became known that the brand plans to bring new models to the global market only with electric drives from 2026 onwards. By 2033, the production of its combustion engines is to be gradually phased out.

"Vorsprung durch Technik is still necessary, because many of the world's major problems, such as CO2 emissions and climate change, can only be solved together with clean technologies. We see ourselves as a guarantor of freedom and individual mobility for our customers," emphasizes Markus Duesmann.

Therefore, the focus is on emission-free drives. With the "Audi DNA" project, the new development chief Oliver Hoffmann aims to focus on tangible innovations, delving deeply into technical details such as steering angle needs, hand torque, and acoustics to develop a brand-typical feel.

"We need to give our products a clear, unmistakable DNA. We will clearly define how an Audi should feel when driving in the future. This also applies to highly automated driving," explains Hoffmann.

On a larger scale, Chief Strategist Silja Pieh and her team have developed a new development process for a sustainable corporate strategy. Together with around 500 employees from all hierarchy levels and major markets such as China and the USA, more than 600 global trends in the mobility sector up to 2030, which could become relevant for the company, were analyzed over several months, and action fields were derived from them. Some insights are obvious. For example, it is expected that revenue and profit will gradually shift, first from the combustion engine to the electric car, and later, when autonomous driving offers additional growth potential, to software and services.

"We want to further strengthen responsible business practices in the future and act consistently," explains Silja Pieh.

The brand aims to prove that individual premium mobility and sustainability can be reconciled, as promised. This also includes the steadily increasing focus on software in the models and automated driving. Increasing connectivity, digital services, and the expansion of self-programmed systems are thus also focal points of the Volkswagen Group strategy alongside electromobility. By 2025, the software workshop connected to Audi, named CARIAD, will develop a scalable software platform with a uniform operating system and cloud connection for all brands of the Group.

"The E3 2.0 software platform will be the enabler for the synergies and innovations of the future, including autonomous driving," announces Markus Duesmann.

In the strategic realignment, the Chinese market will also continue to play an important role in the future. According to estimates from Ingolstadt, the market for premium vehicles will grow to 4.5 million units per year by 2030. In 2020, sales were at 3.1 million vehicles. For electric vehicles, the share could increase from today's 10 percent to up to 40 percent by the end of this decade, according to the forecast from the Danube.

Translated automatically from German.
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