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Audi abandons combustion engine development
- ObsoleteNerd 6y agoAbandons NEW combustion engine development. They’re still developing their existing combustion engine platforms further and aren’t giving up on ICE.
- andrewstuart2 6y agoEven from the title alone, I thought that was pretty clear.
- endisneigh 6y agoReally? How?
- steve_adams_86 6y agoThe word development. They won’t be developing ICE technology any further. It seems unlikely to me that they’d stop producing ICEs altogether, but I can see why they’d focus on developing electric technologies instead.
- bootlooped 6y agoBut they're still iterating on current ICE engines, which you could call development. And in that case they're still developing ICE technology. It sounds like the only thing they're claiming is they will not come up with completely new designs.
- seanmcdirmid 6y agoThe old product will get big fixes and some minor performance improvements (basically maintenance mode), but all the real R&D is happening on the new product.
- yitchelle 6y agoR&D happens on every product. Sometimes only the D occurs without the R.
- andrewstuart2 6y agoYeah, this was exactly my train of thought. That and the fact that it'd be a different story/title if they had completely stopped producing ICE cars, not engine development. There are emissions targets they're still on the hook for.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoAnd an engine product line goes for 10-50yr, more if you don't count a substantial refresh as a "new" architecture.
- kashprime 6y agoICE’s have over a century of development behind them now. I’m not going to miss them, but I wonder if there’s a way to ‘archive’ this kind of specialist mechanical engineering knowledge. It may come in handy one day. It’s depressing to read about engineers having to go to the Smithsonian to study the lunar lander to relearn some of the innovations and improvisations made at the time.
- pmastela 6y agoFor posterity, I wish all this information would make its way to a public repo as to not be lost in the sands of time.
- samus 6y agoWhat purpose should such a repo serve? The most common ones are museums. Yes, they are not perfect, and it is easy to oversimplify and misinterpret what is presented there. If you want to preserve it for survivors of civilisational collapse, then it has to be codified and simplified first. Well done, a civilization could jump tech levels much quicker than if they had had to bootstrap everything first.
- sjwright 6y agoEven if we get to 99% EV within fifty years, it’s going to be a long while after that before EV takes over 100.000% of ICE.
- infinitelooper 6y agoNo doubt they will still license and manufacture ICE tech.
- dv_dt 6y agoAudi is just one of the brands of Volkswagen group. I wonder if Audi will just get support from other groups.
- jaimex2 6y agoThat's exactly what they will do.
- Gibbon1 6y agoDon't know if it's true or not, but saw a comment elsewhere that said Audi mostly uses engines designed by other VW groups. On the other hand VW is showing a heavy commitment to electric vehicle production.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoWhen VW switched over to 4 cylinder turbo charged engines for emission and fuel standards they turned to Audi to do the development since they had a long history with turbo charging (Quattro).
- xiphias2 6y agoAlso Porsche. Taycan is widely successful.
- sn_master 6y agoI wonder if we'll ever see development in External Combustion Engines. They have the same instant torque as electric cars, and in their latest iterations were proven much more efficient than ICE.
- devoutsalsa 6y agoProbably. Executives don’t get their bonuses if they don’t toss around phrases like synergy and economies of scale.
- vbezhenar 6y agoI don’t like those developments. I’m living in Kazakhstan which is huge and cold in winter. People are poor and average car age is 20 years (plenty of cars with 30+ age). Everything is just opposed to electric cars use-cases. And of course we’re too small to be able to manufacture our own engines.
- diebeforei485 6y agoThey will still be produced for many years to come. Combustion engines are basically at the peak of their efficiency at this point, they are heavily dependent on computers and there is not much gain in developing it further.
- account4mypc 6y ago> there is not much gain in developing it further i think there's still cool developments e.g. https://www.freevalve.com https://www.freevalve.com
- cbmuser 6y agoDon’t worry, they‘re not going to stop making and selling cars with combustion engines in the foreseeable future for the reasons you mentioned. This whole electric car hype exists in wealthy urban bubbles only and only because they are heavily subsidized. These cars are still not competitive in the market after all these years and they are completely useless in cold or rural regions.
- 29083011397778 6y ago> only because they are heavily subsidized I mean, you're right - electric vehicles are heavily subsidized. But it's not like it's a one way street where ICE cars have no (indirect, in this case) subsidies. The petro industry has its own share of funding and tax breaks, ranging from greenwashing and public imaging [0] to regular old tax breaks [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Energy_Centre#Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Energy_Centre#Funding [1] https://kimsiever.ca/2020/10/20/alberta-oil-gas-firms-get-3-year-tax-break-on-new-wells-and-pipelines/ https://kimsiever.ca/2020/10/20/alberta-oil-gas-firms-get-3-...
- fy20 6y agoIt's worth mentioning that the Euro 7 standard has not yet been formalised, however the proposal is that it will require CO of less than 0.3g/km (currently 1.0g/km) and NOx of less than 0.03g/km (currently 0.06g/km).
- dukeofdoom 6y agoYeah, I was actually thinking of buying a corvette or other sports car. Because I figure it will be a collectible and worth more money than I pay for it down the line. As they stop making gas cars.
- lixtra 6y agoHow will you refuel it once there is no gas station network anymore? (Assuming electric Utopia is going to come).
- Bancakes 6y agoI fail to see how the oil industry will throw their hands up.
- artificialidiot 6y agoyou won't be able to pump at a gas station but you'll still be able to buy cans of racing blends.
- King-Aaron 6y agoThe same way you can still feed a horse even though they don't have a network of troughs in front of every bar.
- serf 6y ago> I figure it will be a collectible and worth more money than I pay for it down the line. This is generally true whether or not ICE vehicles go anywhere.[0] [0]: https://www.hagerty.com/media/market-trends/most-expensive-corvettes-ever-sold/ https://www.hagerty.com/media/market-trends/most-expensive-c...
- wombatmobile 6y agoA hundred years after EV's become commonplace, our descendants will learn about ICE in history class. They will be told that their great great grandparents' generation dug holes thousands of feet deep in the desert and under the sea to extract the liquid fossilised remains of plants that lived on Earth hundreds of megaannums prior. They took these liquid fossils, refined them in factories, transported them all over the surface of the earth, and poured them one gallon at a time into machines that squirted precise amounts of the precious liquid into metal cylinders where the liquid was set alight to explode thousands of times per minute, in precise amounts calculated to release power to a series of mechanical levers, pulleys, and spinning rods which did for 4 wheels what horses had done in the even more distant past.
- skissane 6y ago> They will be told that their great great grandparents' generation dug holes thousands of feet deep in the desert and under the sea to extract the liquid fossilised remains of plants that lived on Earth hundreds of megaannums prior EVs are not going to eliminate the oil&gas industry. We still need it for aerospace, military, maritime, mining, construction, plastics, chemical feedstocks. Some of those use cases we may find alternatives for over the coming decades, but I reckon in 100 years the oil&gas industry will be still around. Very likely it will be smaller than it is now, but I very much doubt it will be gone completely.
- aitchnyu 6y agoI'm disappointed the history wont mention states that became very wealthy off their deposits, only a few became good stewards of that wealth and the rest just got more skyscrapers and sportscars. They had to import teachers, engineers, system admins and other workers from developing nations, contributing hugely to those economies. And the wars.
- wombatmobile 6y agoOne thing you can be sure of is that the states that became wealthy from fossil fuels will write histories that proclaim the virtues of fossil fuels, and the wisdom of the courses they navigated, in peace and in war. “If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.” ― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
- Neil44 6y agoAudi is a sub-brand of VW Group which owns 12 vehicle brands in total that share engines. I find it strange that an announcement like this would come from a sub-brand and not mention the other wider brands.
- jansan 6y agoI would assume that the Volkswage group cannot abandon development for some reasons: 1. They cover markets that will not be ready for EV in the near future. 2. They will need combution engines for trucks for the forseeable future. I do not think that the Diesel engine has really reached the full potential, yet. 3. While the share of combustion engines will go down significantly, it will not become zero. Having one centralized engine development division may be sufficient for the future.
- wallaBBB 6y agoVW group until recently believed in progress through internal competition, and VW and Audi were the main drivers of this philosophy, but since few years ago VW group announced that they will stop with this and focus on common development across brands. This was most likely done to minimize the automotive crisis impact that was anticipated even without Covid in sight. Audi saying they will not be doing further development, basically doesn't say much in light of this change. Could be more of a marketing thing in the end, or maybe to put some pressure on EU regulations... Generally VW is doing a poor job at transitioning to EV and "connected" vehicles (just take a look at some reviews of ID.4, or issues latest Golf model has) and they do need to put a bigger focus there.
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- tibbydudeza 6y agoAudi 1.8T EA888 Gen 3 - RIP - what a lovely engine it was once all the niggly problems had been sorted.
- xiphias2 6y agoThe plans for the Euro 7 standard are “technically a huge challenge with at the same time little benefit for the environment”. “This places extreme restrictions on the internal combustion engine,” Duesmann said. If the Euro 7 standard has little benefit for the environment, it should be stricter, because the cities are full of toxic gases.
- dkarp 6y agoThey’re saying it has little benefit for the environment and yet they’ve stopped developing new ICEs in favour of electric. Seems like it’s working to me
- xiphias2 6y agoNo, they will still work on upgrading their current engines to Euro 7, but what Euro 7 is is not yet decided, and there are lots of suggestions for anti-cheat measures that I'm sure they don't like.
- martyvis 6y agoPresumably coincidental, but the YouTube algorithm popped this video on Audi building their electric motors for me on Monday. Amazing how much automation is possible - humans almost merely augmenting the process. https://youtu.be/Tp3rsjaUt58 https://youtu.be/Tp3rsjaUt58