Rare Beautiful Audi Rs4 Misano Red Carbon Fiber Package All Options on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Malaise Era All-Stars

A few weeks ago, we bid a fond happy 40th anniversary to the automotive dark ages of 1973-84 that have come to be known as "The Malaise Era" - the performance ice-age when 160 horsepower was a lot and a 0-60 time of under 10 seconds was remarkable. Like music in the 1980s, everything in automobiledom didn't suck, however. There were a few bright spots. Here are five of our favorites:
1976-79 Porsche 930, aka 911 Turbo Carrera (above)
Photo Credit: Dorotheum

Audi: 20-25% of our cars will have a plug by 2025

If you like the promise of Audi's E-Tron Quattro concept, you're going to love this post. Speaking at an intimate dinner in Los Angeles the night before the start of the Los Angeles Auto Show, Audi of America president Scott Keogh had nothing but positive things to say about his brand's future plug-in vehicles, including the production version of the E-Tron Quattro. The most interesting was that he said he expects a full 20 to 25 percent of Audi's sales to be electrified by around 2025, and there was lots of detail to back up his vision. "This is the reality as we see it." - Scott Keogh Keogh wasn't making specific predictions, but it's been a long while since we've heard such a high-level Audi executive act like such a troubadour for the electric vehicle future. As long-time readers will remember, we used to hear things like this from Nissan's Carlos Ghosn, but public predictions have taken a bit of a back seat recently. It's promising to hear reasonable optimism again. "When you look at what needs to happen and you look at what we see happening in the marketplace, we're probably looking at a world where 25 percent of Audi's sales, over the next ten years, just to throw out a rough point in the future, are either going to be full electric or have some plug," Keogh said. "This is the reality as we see it." The reason Keogh is so positive is because Audi thinks the E-Tron Quattro concept is going to birth one heck of an EV. Whatever it's called when it arrives – it's unlikely to be the Q6, as some rumors have it. Internally, Audi is calling it the C-BEV, since it is a C-segment Battery Electric Vehicle – the concept previews a luxury all-electric vehicle with a range of over 300 miles. No one is talking about the price yet, but Audi of America's director of product management, Filip Brabec, did say that the sweet spot for the pricing is in the range of how mainstream luxury vehicles are priced today. "If you can put a car in the market that's priced right ... people are going to want to buy it," Keogh said. Read into all of that what you will. It's not just the price that's going to be right. Keogh said that the key point is changing hearts and minds to want electric vehicles. That means tripling down on public infrastructure (see more below) and making sure the car itself is amazing. "Everyone knows, in the history of the world, launch a defining, game-changing product, in whatever category it bloody is, and - boom - the world changes," Keogh said.

Audi readying diesel PHEV models for US and Europe

With the racing pedigree provided by the Audi R18 E-Tron Quattro, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the German king of Le Mans is capitalizing on the connection between its road cars and race cars at every opportunity. Maybe there's an entire range of Le Mans Editions for the automakers diesel-hybrid offerings, with perhaps Tom Kristensen acting as the brand's spokesperson for the technology in Europe. You'd be wrong, though, because despite the R18's overwhelming successes in endurance racing, Audi the road-car manufacturer doesn't offer a single diesel-hybrid production car.
This factoid will hopefully be as short lived as it is disappointing, though, as a diesel-electric is around the corner, according to the brand's tech boss, Ulrich Hackenberg. In fact, it gets better than a mere diesel-hybrid; it will be a plug-in diesel-hybrid, only the second to hit the market, alongside the European-market Volvo V60.
According to Hackenberg, the new tech will be the result of a marriage between the brand's well-received 3.0-liter, TDI V6 with an electric motor. The next-generation Audi Q7 (shown above) will be the initial recipient, confirming previous reports that claimed a PHEV TDI could come to the next-gen CUV. Its MLB architecture, meanwhile, would allow the plug-in-hybrid-diesel powertrain to be fitted easily enough to the A8 luxury sedan. While the new Q7 should hit the market at some point in 2015, it's unclear when the PHEV TDI model could see the light of day.