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Audi's Project Artemis woes could delay range of VW Group EVs

Two years ago, Audi's then new CEO Markus Duesmann announced his first big initiative called Project Artemis. The plan's marquee component is "to implement a new lighthouse project for Audi in record time," being "a highly efficient electric car scheduled to be on the road as early as 2024" on a brand new platform that would be shared with Porsche and Bentley. An ex-VW and -Porsche man named Alex Hitzinger, who'd also spent time at Apple working on the tech company's electric car, was brought on board to lead Project Artemis and come up with new ideas. Parent Volkswagen Group said it wanted to become "as agile as in a racing team," removing the bureaucratic molasses and bottlenecks interfering with getting the best product on the road in the best time. However, in any grand venture, failure comes before success. Automobilwoche reports that Artemis is struggling through issues large enough to push the product plans back by years. The issue, as it was with the ID.3 lineup on the eve of that car's launch, is software. Well, that's the latest, largest problem; Artemis has already been through copious struggles before getting to the software bit. Two months after Hitzinger came on, in December 2020, VW raised its EV volume target from 50% to 70% by 2030. That necessitated a rethink of the VW Group's entire platform strategy considering the far greater production scale. Hitzinger only lasted six months in the job, ousted in May 2021, supposedly because Audi believed his ideas were "not suitable for profitable series production" among other reasons. By that time, the pace of software development was already said to be six months behind schedule, with the Car.Software division working on VW.OS 2.0 "not yet running at the speed hoped for." Internal frictions were noteworthy and costly as well. VW's commercial division plant in Hanover was meant to build Artemis vehicles for Audi, Porsche and Bentley, but Automobilwoche reported in January of this year that Porsche paid a ""small three-digit million amount" — like $100 million or so — to get out of the deal mandating its vehicles come from the Hanover facility.    So Audi effectively brought Artemis in-house to lead vehicle development, and Car.Software turned into Cariad to get VW.OS and VW.AC, which stands for Automotive Cloud, to market.  The first Audi vehicle under Project Artemis was planned to arrive by the end of 2024, a production version of the Grandsphere concept.

NHTSA awards Audi A3 and S3 sedans five stars

The Audi A3 and S3 sedans aced the New Car Assessment Program tests run by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, each scoring five stars overall. The A3 sedan adds this latest five-star rating to its Top Safety Pick+ award bestowed upon it by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety earlier this year, and Audi says it's the only Euro premium luxury compact to do that double. The only place either car dropped a single star was for a male driver in the frontal barrier test and in the rollover test. It's clear from the lengthening list of top marks – and its list of safety technology – that it's among the safest sedans you can buy. Featured Gallery 2015 Audi A3: Review View 36 Photos News Source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration [1], [2] via Audi World Government/Legal Audi Safety Sedan crash test audi s3

2015 Audi S3 Sedan

For the last few years, Audi has been publicly toying with building a successor to its Ur-Quattro, a model still glowing in a gritty patina of motorsports glory decades after it left the scene. If anything, the rally car's halo has burned brighter as Audi has matured into a world luxury superpower. Since 2010, the German automaker has shown two different concept cars that attempted to re-bottle the legend's lightning, and it's still trying to figure out whether to market a production model. Despite that conundrum (and not to take anything away from the seminal Ur-Quattro), it's easy to argue that there are two other cars much more important to Audi's rise from its '80s ashes: the original TT and the B5-generation A4 and its high-performance variants.
The TT thrust Audi into the vanguard of automotive styling while firmly establishing the Volkswagen Group as masters of platform development (the same basic architecture and powertrain guts were employed in a dizzying array of models, from the Golf, Jetta and New Beetle to a number of Škoda products). This unprecedented, flexible building-block approach to new model development has since become the standard of the industry.
In the case of its B5 cars, the A4, S4 and RS4 put Audi back on the radar of rival German automakers, and more importantly, they grew the Four Rings' sales by leaps and bounds while reminding the world that all-wheel drive needn't only benefit hardcore performance cars and utility vehicles. Fast-forward to today, and the A4 has established itself as the bedrock of Audi's lineup, but it's also grown over its four generations to become substantially larger, heavier and costlier than the model that debuted back in 1996 America. That's created a vacuum at the bottom of the range that the company has inadequately addressed - until now.