Audi. Vorsprung. 2025. Digital, sustainable and urban: the customer is center stage

On the way to becoming the premium digital car company, Audi has launched the biggest transformation in its corporate history. The brand is becoming digital throughout and sustainably economical in order to redefine urban mobility.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is disruptive. Every market player is duty bound to invent something completely new from the ground up. Otherwise, there’s a risk of being left behind by the competition; not least by those who have only recently emerged onto the mobility market with new approaches, services and ideas.

Just how inspired Audi is by this challenge can be seen in Barcelona. It reflects the very essence of the company and its employees. Vorsprung is in Audi’s DNA – it describes the approach that the company has always taken when driving forward its activities. An approach that Audi will also continue to pursue in the future, ensuring customers are offered solutions that create Vorsprung for them too.

quattro, lightweight construction, TFSI... all provide classic proof of this almost proverbial Vorsprung durch Technik (Advancement through Technology). And setting benchmarks again in this regard is the new Audi A8, whose launch will be the keynote event in Barcelona. The fact that Vorsprung means much more than just technology is proven by the innovations on show in the A8.

Like a start-up company, Audi is moving quickly and unconventionally into new business areas, introducing new methods of production and changing mobility in the urban landscape. As a pledge, Vorsprung is always associated with the desire to never be content with the status quo, but instead to question it in order to find better solutions. Because for Audi, Vorsprung means much more than being a pioneer – Vorsprung embodies the aspiration to give customers of the brand more freedom.

With this strategy in mind, three clear focal points are being presented in Barcelona. Audi. Vorsprung. – always digital, sustainable and urban.

Digital
The new digital era is here. The Internet of Things gives us immediate access to billions of items of data. Intelligent algorithms, self-learning machines and artificial intelligence are themselves able to evaluate Big Data, thus opening up a new dimension in added value for the customer.

Virtual reality tools will enable customers to configure their dream car interactively. Under the motto “an Audi when I want and where I want”, Audi plans to enhance the concept of individual mobility with premium on-demand solutions, to be rolled out in 15 markets by 2020. A new digital platform will provide Audi drivers and passengers with information, entertainment and added value.

The production facilities of tomorrow will also be networked. The Smart Factory synchronizes all manufacturing steps digitally. Modular production processes, artificial intelligence and human-robot cooperation make automotive construction more flexible and easier on resources. 

Substainable
The trendsetting postmodern and upper liberal milieus aspire to a sustainable lifestyle. They are Audi’s core target group. Other social milieus will follow their lead over the next few years. Audi acknowledges the responsibilities it has in a society where sustainability is a key element.

Greenovations, technological achievements which can be deployed to protect the environment and the climate, are emerging in ever greater numbers along the entire value chain. The Audi Environmental Foundation seeks out these greenovations and is active in seeing them implemented.

In the race for the future, electromobility is the driving force of Audi: by 2020 there will be three high-performance electric models with striking designs. Under the slogan “Clean cars from clean factories”, Audi is currently implementing measures to make Audi e-tron electric car production in Brussels CO₂ neutral. In the world of the combustion engine, too, Audi is resolutely focusing on CO₂-neutral mobility. Synthetic fuels, plug-in and mild hybrids, aerodynamics, and lightweight construction increase the efficiency of the core model series.

Urban
Vorsprung needs vision. Which is why Audi is also shaping the day after tomorrow. Trend scouts and designers from Audi Innovation Research are exploring future scenarios in megacities around the world, and are already deriving the next generations of products and services based on their findings. Mobility services such as Audi on Demand are evidence of the brand’s particular aspiration to premium mobility.

Vorsprung in the urban context is about having an understanding of the logic and life-world of cities and working with them to develop smart solutions. With technologies such as piloted driving and parking and the networked urban infrastructure, Audi is playing an active role in the continuing evolution of urban mobility. For people on the move, new smartphone applications such as the myAudi app provide wide-ranging, personally tailored assistance for their day-to-day lives.

Audi.Vorsprung. In its ambition, this strategy extends far beyond 2025 and raises the entire company and its activities to a new level. Investment in any one of the three areas of strategic focus will inevitably have a positive impact on the other two. And in this respect, it is digitalization which often provides the key to greater sustainability and better urban solutions.

One example illustrates this point. Today, 40 percent of the urban traffic volume is made up of vehicles searching for a parking space. Audi is linking traffic flow information with the sensor data that can be obtained in anonymous form from other vehicles via the HERE digital map provider. As a result, it will very soon be possible to guide drivers with pin-point accuracy to vacant parking spaces. Driving around in search of a space will become a thing of the past, congestion will be reduced. AUDI AG has been a partner in HERE since 2016. Investment in a real-time reality index of the world is set to provide added value to everyone in the town or city, for example by helping to reduce unnecessary traffic. This will contribute massively to sustainability.

Digital, sustainable, urban. A three-point strategy with one result: Audi.Vorsprung.

The equipment, data and prices specified in this document refer to the model range offered in Germany. Subject to change without notice; errors and omissions excepted.