2013 Audi A6 Premium Plus Navigation All-wheel Drive Bose Premium Sound Sy on 2040-cars

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2015 Audi A3 Sedan priced from $29,900* [w/video]

One year after the all-new Audi A3 bowed in Europe, the US finally will get the 2015 A3 sedan in 2014, and the German automaker announced yesterday that it's priced from $29,900 (*not including destination, and we've reached out to Audi asking for the price of delivery). A bit later in 2014, the A3 Cabriolet will be released along with the S3 sedan. The A3 Sportback will be a 2015 model, though it will only be offered as a gasoline-electric hybrid. Prices weren't given for those models and, sadly, the three-door hatch isn't slated for US consumption.
The A3 sedan will be offered with three engine choices, all of them featuring direct-injection, turbocharging and four cylinders: a 1.8-liter TFSI, 2.0-liter TFSI and 2.0-liter TDI - that last one's a diesel. If you count the S3 sedan, that's another engine in the lineup - a 296-horsepower version of the 2.0 TFSI.
As we were told at the 2014 A3's "unofficial" world debut in New York City earlier this year, Audi says US customers won't get the option of a six-speed manual transmission, as the Europeans do. All engines will be mated exclusively to a six-speed dual-clutch transmission.

Notes from Day One of the 2013 Twelve Hours of Sebring

The 61st edition of The 12 Hours of Sebring is on, and Autoblog has come to central Florida with Audi to feast on jumbo boiled peanuts, pickled eggs and the final race for the LMP1 class at the oldest road course in North America. As Audi has been doing for more than a decade now, it's brought its latest endurance race car, the 2013-spec R18 etron quattro, to Sebring to begin testing for Le Mans.
Why the commitment to Sebring? Audi Sport executives have repeatedly called Sebring "punishing," "extremely demanding" and "one of the toughest tracks in the world." It is a 3.47-mile circuit that, in places, feels like it was made from the leftover bits of other circuits. Doing the 12-hour distance in Florida is thought to be a good start on lasting the 24-hour distance in France, and we can't think it a coincidence that Audi has won ten times here in the last 13 years and 11 times in Gaul.
Where there's rhyme - and victory - there is reason. We think we found a few of them on our first day where preparation, technology, fastidious attention to detail and sweat fit right in with swamp cabbage...

Audi CEO says brand's EVs are almost as profitable as its other cars

After, oh, a hundred years or so of building vehicles primarily powered by internal combustion engines, automakers around the world have been and still are pumping billions of dollars into the development of electric vehicle technology. Everything from platforms and batteries to motors and the software to control it all requires untold hours of development, and that takes time and money. Fortunately, it's not going to take long for that massive investment to start paying off, at least according to Audi CEO Markus Duesmann, who told Reuters in an interview that "The point where we earn as much money with electric cars as with combustion engine cars is now, or ... next year, 2023. They are very even now, the prices." As a brand, Audi contributed more than a quarter of overall profit for the massive Volkswagen Group, which has such powerhouse brands as Volkswagen and Porsche among others. Under the Audi umbrella are Lamborghini, Bentley and Ducati, and it seems those high-end branches aren't going anywhere, at least for now. "These brands ... are very valuable very profitable brands, where we can even expand the synergy level in the future," Duesmann said in the interview. "There are no plans whatsoever to get rid of them." Despite the overall profitability of the brand, the ongoing global chip crisis is causing headaches. "We had a very strong first half in 2021. We do expect a much weaker second half," said Duesmann, who added, "We really have trouble." In fact, so serious is the trouble that the brand is forced into "a day-to-day troubleshooting process" to limit the chip-shortage damage. The good news for the automaker is that Audi has been able to boost its profit margin from 8% prior to the pandemic in 2019 to 10.7% in the first half of 2021. The bad news is that various chip shortages aren't expected to get a whole lot better over the rest of the year. Related video: