Audi aims to debut fully electric E-Tron GT sports car in 2022

Audi has not been silent about its plans to offer full electric vehicles starting 2020. Earlier, this year, Audi chief executive Rupert Stadler revealed plans to release an electric SUV, a compact EV and electric sports car. Now, a recent report revealed that this new electric sports car already has a name – the Audi E-Tron GT.

This was announced by Peter Mertens, a member of the Audi management board, during an interview with Auto Motor Und Sport. The new electric sports car will be a battery-powered all-electric unit that will be underpinned by the same platform that would underpin the upcoming Porsche Mission E, which is also an electric sports car in the making. This architecture is the so-called Premium Platform Electric (PPE), which is to some extent the luxury version of the MEB platform of the VW Group. Around 60 percent of the vehicles underpinned by PPE would be Audi models, while the rest would be Porsche units.

Porsche has promised to deliver its first all-electric sports car by 2019, while Mertens indicated that Audi will release the E-Tron GT in 2022. Of course, the final production version of the Mission E would contain design elements that would make it easily recognizable as a Porsche. The same would be true for Audi’s upcoming electric sports car; the E-Tron GT would don distinctive design and styling elements that would make it effortlessly identifiable as an Audi. The E-Tron GT is expected to borrow a number design cues from Audi’s newer concept cars like the Q8 as well as from Audi’s other EVs like the outgoing R8 E-Tron.

Both Audi and Porsche are part of the Volkswagen Group, so are premium marques like Lamborghini, Bentley and Bugatti. The VW Group recently launched the Roadmap E program that calls for the creation of 80 new electrified units – spread among group brands – by 2025. Of these 80 electrified units, 50 models would be purely battery-powered vehicles while the remaining 30 would be plug-in hybrids. Audi has revealed that this figure would increase over subsequent years until 2030 at the latest, until each of the VW Group’s 300 or so models across all vehicle classes has at least one electrified version.

As for the Porsche Mission E, this upcoming four-door all-electric sports car could be considered as an embodiment of superior performance as blended with the practicality of an 800-volt drive system. The Mission E is designed and developed to offer over 600 hp (440 kW) of output sent to all wheels, allowing the electric sports car to accelerate from nil to 62 mph in less than 3.5 seconds. A fully charged Mission E has an electric range of 310 miles, and just needs around 15 minutes of re-charging to achieve an 80-percent charge. The new E-Tron GT could offer a similar performance when it arrives in 2022.