Audi's EV "Wokeness" Feels Forced, Leads to Bewildering and Illogical Model Name Overhaul

I’d like to give props to Audi designers and shot callers for not going bonkers when it comes to styling during these past few years. Compared to Mercedes and BMW, the Ingolstadt carmaker has been relatively quiet, for better or worse (although I’d argue that for better).

Let’s start with Mercedes. They went “EQ crazy” about 8 years ago when the Generation EQ concept was first unveiled at the Paris Motor Show. Fast forward a few years and the first EQ-brand model, the EQC, would enter production.

They did a good job with the EQC styling-wise. It looked like a more elegant GLC, which is exactly what they should have been going for – unlike the EQE SUV and the EQS SUV, which look like jellybeans on wheels. Same goes for the EQE sedan and the EQS sedan. This pod-like teardrop design feels way too radical even by modern day standards, and the fact that company execs are now considering shifting back to more traditional designs speaks volumes.

Mercedes recognize that an “EV push” of sorts was necessary at first, in a bid to catch up with Tesla. They needed their customers to be painfully aware of their EVs, and not mistake them for anything else. I guess that’s a sensible argument.

BMW, on the other hand, have fallen way too far down the rabbit hole with their designs, sifting through several styling languages over the course of only a few years. From their first Gxx models to the iX or the XM, and then the monolithic all-new 5 Series and 7 Series. Was that the end of it? Nope, because their Neue Klasse models are inbound, and they’ll represent a whole new shift in design. What a headache.

Meanwhile, what has Audi been doing? Well, at first, I thought that people in charge of the brand had a clear vision for going forward and wouldn’t overreact to anything. The fact that most e-tron variants still looked like their internal combustion engine counterparts was a good thing. Now, while I don’t have enough data to say anything bad about future Audi designs (nor would I want to, necessarily), I can tell you that their desperate need for EV adoption is about to impact a lot of their legacy models, and in turn, their fans.

You’ve probably seen articles titled like ‘Audi S6 Avant-Replacing Audi A7 Avant Spied with High-Voltage Stickers’ recently and thought: “What?”

Well, here’s ‘what’. According to Audi board member, Oliver Hoffmann, having an A6 with a combustion engine and an A6 e-tron was getting too confusing, so they decided to separate the ICE models from the EVs completely. Going forward, successors to existing internal combustion models will switch to odd numbers: A3, A5, A7, while next-gen EVs will use even numbers: A4, A6, Q4, Q6 and so on.

This is probably the part where we’re supposed to think this is useful or clever. It’s not. It’s confusing and unnecessary, and it’s going to damage legacy nameplates that should have had the right to move forward into the future untethered. You should never rename an iconic nameplate, not even temporarily. Audi hopes to stop producing ICE models altogether by the end of 2030, at which point, who knows what’s going to happen? Are they going to revert to some of those nameplates? Probably not. I don’t know. And to think just how easy it’s been throughout the decades to pinpoint with Hawkeye-like accuracy every single one of their models within the range.

When Audi began using letters (mostly) for model designations, the thought process went a little something like this:

• A: Stands for everyday non-performance Audi models, ranging from hatchbacks to sedans, and wagons.
• S: Stands for ‘Sport’ and it applies to the carmaker’s performance-oriented models, which tend to also feature more aggressive styling and more powerful engines.
• RS: Means ‘RennSport’, aka ‘racing’ in German. These are exclusively high-performance models. Flagship specs that can rival BMW M or Mercedes-AMG.
• Q: Stands for ‘quattro’, so it’s only natural that they used this for their SUV lineup.

As for the numbers that followed those letters, they indicated a specific segment.

• A3/S3/RS3: Compact hatchback/sedan.
• A4/S4/RS4: Sports sedan/wagon.
• A5/S5/RS5: Coupe, convertible or Sportback models with a focus on style.
• A6/S6/RS6: Midsize executive sedan/wagon.
• A7/S7/RS7: Sportback executive model with a fastback design.
• A8/S8: Full-size luxury sedan.

You know the rest. No need to go through all the Q models or the R8, TT and so on. The point is, it was simple and clean, and it allowed for continuation, which is very important when it comes to legacy.

Come next year, the S4 will become the S5 Sportback, while the S7 Avant becomes the new S6 Avant. Are you telling me this is less confusing than just going forward using e-tron nomenclature? You would've had the A6 and the A6 e-tron. Simple. One’s ICE-powered, one’s electric, and at one point soon, they’ll all be electric, and you could drop the ‘e-tron’ moniker altogether.

But no, they just had to go fix what was never broken to begin with. This is much worse than when BMW decided to rename the M3 Coupe the M4. That was confusing too, by the way, and over a decade later, I’m still not sure it was the right call. There was nothing wrong with M3 Coupe.

In the title, I used the term “wokeness”, and maybe some of you feel as though that doesn’t make any sense or that it doesn’t apply to this situation specifically. However, keep in mind that most (if not all) marketing decisions nowadays are being taken by people walking on eggshells, trying to appease either something (a social movement) or somebody (a specific group of individuals).

So, when the Karens of the world get confused by the fact that you could have a normal A6 and then an A6 e-tron, Audi made the decision to solve one problem (which wasn’t even a problem), by creating another. We’ve known for decades that, for example, you compare the BMW 3 Series to the Audi A4 and the Mercedes C-Class. These rivalries are embedded within car culture. But going forward, or at least temporarily, ICE-powered 3 Series variants will no longer be comparable to the A4, but the A5.

This is what happens when you as a carmaker are less interested in honoring longstanding rivalries (like A4 vs. 3 Series) and would rather throw everything you’ve got at the likes of the Tesla Model 3. The sad part is that they could have done both, without reshuffling the model range.