Audi R8 e-tron shuffles off its Mortal Coil

Bye bye, Audi R8 e-tron. 

There have been rumours aplenty about the Audi R8 e-tron project, the all-electric supercar from Audi, and how it was about to shuffle off its mortal coil and end up in the trash can of good ideas that just didn’t work. The demise of what was lauded as a future ‘Brave New World’ supercar has now been officially announced by an Audi spokesperson, Amelia Fine-Morrison, who confirmed what many industry insiders had been saying for some time about the future viability of the future supercar.

The very short life of the R8 e-tron began just a few months ago at the 2015 Geneva Auto Show, but even then it was proving to be a problem child for Audi and the newly promoted CEO Ulrich Hackenburg. Previously, the project had been cancelled due to the high cost, overweight and underwhelming range issues, but under Ulrich, the clever Audi engineers applied some vorsprung deutch technik and managed to resolve some of the problems, making the project seem more viable.

To solve the range problem, Audi turned to a neat bit of lateral thinking by designing T-shaped batteries, called the e-tron 2.0, and that meant the e-tron could actually get up to 450 kilometres in range, which is pretty respectable, with 456hp on hand. But with a million Euro price tag to purchase the bespoke vehicle, production was always going to be limited and therein laid the problem. Audi is supposed to be focusing on cars that people actually want to buy and of course can afford to do so.

This will not be the last EV offering we see from Audi. Fine-Morrison confirmed in her statement that in the future, the company is committed to building electric-powered cars in high volume, which should be no surprise after they showcased the rather more mundane e-tron Quattro concept at the recent Frankfurt Show. This car runs on a similar platform to the R8 but is touted to have a range of some 500 kilometres. If and when it actually comes to market, and for now we are being told this will be in 2018, it will be badged as the Q6 e-tron.