Audi to drop five old-world models, add five new clean-air ones

If Future is an Attitude (the current number one Audi catchphrase in Europe), the brand's post-diesel mindset calls for a distinctly different balance of products and technologies.

In this new up-market scenario, the A1 will not be replaced because what is essentially a tarted up Volkswagen Polo lacks the required minimum content of premium-ness and desirability.

The Q2 also bites the dust because it is by and large an overrated yet under-qualified Q1/Volkswagen T-Cross which picked up the wrong badge and is not consistently up to Audi standards either.

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The TT loses its job as coupé and roadster because the market for two-door models is in free-fall, even for versions fitted with that charismatic five-cylinder engine. The R8 is no longer appropriate because of its larger-than-life CO2 footprint created by the doomed V10 engine.

The E-Tron and E-Tron Sportback will go down in history as one-hit, one-cycle wonders because their hotchpotch architecture was merely an intermezzo on the road to bespoke fully-electric motor cars.

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What exactly is the compensation for fewer emotional products and niche models? A bunch of new members of the E-Tron family, to start with.

But hold your horses – the next A3, A4, A5, A6, Q3, Q5, Q7 and Q8 still remain faithful to their combustion engine roots. Hot on their heels, however, Audi will between 2023 and 2032 launch a full range of battery-powered clean-air machines of similar style, format and vocation.

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Perhaps the most exciting all-new E-Tron ambassador is the 2025 Landjet which may be badged E9. This is, you guessed it, the production version of the Grand Sphere concept.

What is going to happen to the Sky Sphere roadster and the Urban Sphere luxury people mover? The low-volume Sky may be too flamboyant for its own good, but the Urban looks like it has got what it takes to write the next chapter of the still young CUV history.

Also ranking high on our thumbs up list are the 2025 600kW-plus R8 – twinned with the Lamborghini Huracan replacement – the 2023 Q6 E-Tron and Q6 E-Tron Fastback – to run on the same platform as the Porsche Macan E – the Q8 E-Tron – twinned with the 2029 Urus, and the still-to-be-approved R6 E-Tron, based around the same platform as the electric successors to Porsche's Cayman and Boxster.