Audi’s Next Fully Electric Model Revealed — Q4 e-tron

Volkswagen Group is an interesting beast. It doesn’t exactly excel at electric vehicle sales — globally or even in Europe — but it has one of the most aggressive electric vehicle investment plans — maybe even the most aggressive plan. Many consumers are quick to say, “Show me a real, live, available product and stop with the press releases!” Others are excited about the models planned for the next few years and the €35 billion ($40 billion) Volkswagen Group says it’s investing in e-mobility by 2022.

This split in perspective is perhaps displayed no better than by naming the various fully electric models VW has announced but you can’t yet buy: the VW ID Neo, the VW ID Crozz, the VW ID Buzz, the Audi e-tron coupe/sedan, the Audi e-tron SUV (just now starting to roll out), the Porsche Taycan, and actually the list goes on as you pull in other Volkswagen Group brands.

Nonetheless, Audi decided it was now time to introduce another electric model. This time it’s the Audi Q4 e-tron concept.

Either Volkswagen Group is going to flood the market in a few years and start eating up electric market share like a hero, or its going to get slammed big time by consumers if much of this PR doesn’t turn into serious action. (Serious action = competitive electric vehicles ready for genuine mass production.)

I spoke with a Volkswagen exec a few months ago who was adamant it was the former. He was confident that the company was putting the production capacity in place to sell as many VW, Audi, Porsche, SEAT, and Škoda electric cars as customers wanted — in the US, Europe, China, and elsewhere.

We’ll see. In the meantime, we’ve got some more sketches. It just seems that the artist went a little overboard on the wheels.

The Q4 e-tron will be shown at the coming Geneva Motor Show, which Maarten will be on the ground for. Beyond that, “the Audi Q4 e-tron concept provides a glimpse of the next stage of Audi electric mobility and is due to be presented as a volume-production vehicle in late 2020/early 2021,” Audi notes.

So, in two years, you should be able to buy one of these. What do you say? Ready to put down a deposit?