If you are an automotive enthusiast, you gotta know the insides and outsides of a car and at the bare minimum, be able to tell some details from its name. The German automobile manufacturer Audi has decided to change the way it names its vehicles. The new names of the cars are intended to make the comparison between vehicles easier. The initial part of the name like A4, A5, Q5, and Q7 will stay the same, but the engine displacement number will be eliminated.
The current system prefers the rational fuel cars, and the new naming system of Audi cars is meant to make space for the upcoming electric vehicles and help people understand the power output of the vehicle. The new names will emphasize the EVs and bring them at a comparable level to conventional fuel vehicles in terms of power rather than the engine.
The Board of Management Member for Sales and Marketing at Audi AG, Dr. Dietmar Voggenreiter explained, “As alternative drive technologies become increasingly relevant, engine displacement as a performance attribute is becoming less important to our customers. The clarity and logic of structuring the designations according to power output makes it possible to distinguish between the various performance levels.”
The need for the new naming system is undeniable, but it is in no way an easy task to devise the perfect system to compare the power of an EV to a conventional fuel vehicle accurately. A two-liter engine in an Audi car is represented by a 2.0, and it will now be replaced a by a two digit number representing engine power in kilowatts. This won’t be the actual power but one of the power bands that Audi has devised to represent it.
The cars with an engine power between 81 and 96 kW will hold a “30” band with their names while the 169 to 185 kW vehicles will lie in the 45 band. The 70 band is reserved for cars with engine power over 400 kW.
The new names for the cars will then have the model name, then the band number followed by the engine technology in a short hand version. TFSI will be used for Turbocharged gasoline engines, TDI for Turbocharged, G-Tron for compressed natural gas while the electric ones will be represented by E-Tron.
The high-end S and RS performance cars will be exempted from the new nomenclature and will continue to be called named like the R8 supercar. The new Audi A8 is expected to come out by the end of this year, and that is where the new naming system will officially begin. What would have previously been named the A8 3.0 TDI will now be called A8 50 TDI. The electric vehicle range from Audi is due to be released sometime in 2018.
Audi has taken an important step to make it easier for consumers to choose between the varying types of vehicles but we do not know if other manufacturers will follow the same lines to make this an industry standard, which clearly sounds like the need of the day.