Audi To Abandon Baffling Powertrain Badging Structure

Six years ago, Audi unveiled a new naming system for its cars’ powertrains. With downsized engines and electric cars ever more prominent, it needed a way to denote where a model sat in its range without relying on old-fashioned engine displacement badging like ‘3.0 TDI’.

Its solution, though, just made everything more complicated. It replaced traditional badging with a range of numbers ranging from 30 to 70, which were tied fairly arbitrarily to the car’s power output. These would then be followed by TFSI, TDI and e-tron for petrol, diesel and electric cars respectively, with an extra ‘e’ tacked on to hybrids. This confusing system made the 114bhp Q2 1.6 TDI become the Q2 30 TDI, while the 249bhp A4 2.0 TFSI was renamed the A4 45 TFSI.

This was a potentially misleading way of doing things given that the badges looked like they represented engine displacement until closer inspection revealed the lack of a decimal place. When Car Throttle had a Q8 50 TDI on test a few years ago, more than one person asked if it had a 5.0-litre V8…

The structure applied to all of Audi’s range bar the TT, R8 and S and RS models, until now. The company has confirmed that going forward, it’ll be ditching this system. Speaking to Auto Express at the launch of the new Q6 e-tron electric SUV, Audi’s Head of Sales & Product Marketing for Battery Electric Vehicles, Florian Hauser, confirmed that the badging structure will be removed from Audi’s electric cars to begin with.

It comes as part of a drive to simplify Audi’s model range. Going forward, most of its EVs will be offered with two power outputs, with the more powerful one getting an ‘S’ prefixing its name and four-wheel drive versions being denoted with traditional ‘Quattro’ badging.

Audi also confirmed that external badging denoting this system would be dropped from its combustion cars, but is undecided on whether it’ll be abandoned altogether or still used internally and on configurators and brochures.

Regardless, it should make things a lot simpler for customers and onlookers alike, who’ll no longer need to try and figure out what the ‘50’ refers to on the back of a Q7.