THIRTY-ONE YEARS. That’s how long the Audi A4 nameplate has been in existence, but Ingolstadt has, without much in the way of sentimentality, decided to quietly kill it. Perhaps we should have seen the writing on the wall given the fact that of the five generations of A4, the last one, the B9, had been with us for a decade, albeit with a facelift halfway through that tenure. In other words, Audi was really wringing all profits out of the last of the line.

To summarise, Audi launched the original B5 generation A4 in 1994, the B6 followed in 2000, the B7 in 2004 and the B8 in 2007. This stuck around for eight years before being replaced by the B9 in 2015. In its first full calendar year on sale, it registered 2963 sales, which was pretty good going and the A4’s best ever year in this country. But then the G20 BMW 3 Series, a superior car in most objective regards, arrived and the Audi couldn’t stand up to it. In 2019, the 3 Series saw 3135 registrations and the A4 had wilted to 1284 sales.

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Worse was to come. By the time the W206 Mercedes-C-Class had registered its first full year of sales in 2022, it was selling 3566 units, and Audi trickled just 535 A4s out of the doors of dealers. Both cars had seen their market share demolished by the Tesla Model 3, which was scoring a 44.2 per cent market share in the ‘Medium >$60k’ category. To June this year, Audi has shifted just 25 cars, making the A4 a model that’s outsold by the Bentley Continental GT. That’s probably not something that the Volkswagen Group ever envisaged during its acquisition phase.

Tesla has clearly demonstrated that this category is not moribund if you bring the right product at the right price. In effect, the A4 has been left to wither on the vine, and rebranding it as an A5 may not be enough. It was part of a move by Audi to allocate even numbers to electric vehicles and odd numbers to combustion-engined cars but the launch of the petrol A6 and electric A6 e-tron seems to have thrown a big old spanner into those works. As recent history has shown, Audi nomenclature changes can create more issues than they solve.

Conventional sedan, coupe and convertible models are no more. The A5 features a hatchback which, in effect, replaces both the old A4 saloon and the A5 Sportback. Thankfully an Avant estate is still offered, but the old A4 Allroad has bitten its own dust.

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The A4 had many highlights, many of which bore an S or an RS badge. The B7 RS4, with its 309kW 4.2-litre atmo V8, sweetly tactile six-speed manual transmission and modest (by today’s standards) 1650kg kerb weight is fondly remembered, but there was genius in the simpler vehicles too. We all swooned slightly over the cabin richness of the B6 when that landed at the turn of the century, and loved the B5’s 20v 110kW 1.8T powerplant, an engine that was very hard to escape in VAG products, such was its excellence.

But the axe has finally fallen on the storied A4 nameplate. Given that Audi is terrible at naming its cars and that it’ll probably run out of other options, who knows? Maybe it’ll be back. For now, however, it’s auf wiedersehen.

This article originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of Wheels magazine. Subscribe here and gain access to 12 issues for $109 plus online access to every Wheels issue since 1953.