It’s been long rumoured, long discussed and long hinted at, but it’s now official: Audi has confirmed it will produce an all-electric sports car as a replacement for the departing R8 model. Confirmation came from Audi Sport’s head of product marketing, who told Roadshow magazine that the company’s next sport halo car won’t have an internal combustion engine.
“Our next challenge will be to transform the R segment, and the R segment is going to be fully electric. This is our job for the next decade.”
- Linda Kurz, Audi Sport head of product marketing
Whether the new performance EV carries the R8 name remains an open question. And whether the new model will even be considered a direct descendant of the R8 or the start of a whole new model lineage is kind of a matter of semantics. What matters is that Audi wants to continue to feature a halo sports car in its lineup, and that it has acknowledged the inevitable and decided it will be all-electric.
Audi has already started the electrification of its RS range, and the company says it is simply following down the same path with the R model. The plan is for 80 percent of the RS model lineup to be at least partially electrified by 2026. We don’t yet know the plan for the electric R8 or whatever it will be called, but we’re imagining a maximum five-year timeline.
This isn’t the first time Audi has made an attempt at going electric with its resident supercar. The German automaker produced an R8 e-tron in 2015 and 2016, but the experiment ended there after sales barely reached 100 units. But that was then, and now Audi is having another go at it in an automotive environment that is radically different.
