Life isn’t so easy for automotive manufacturers right now. Take Porsche, which just published preliminary financial numbers for last year and projections for 2025. While things aren’t Tesla levels of bad, they’re not exactly great. Sales were down 28 percent in China last year and 3 percent overall. Worse yet, profit margins are just over 10 percent, far below the 18 percent the company was targeting.
As a result, Porsche says it’s taking “extensive measures” to improve profitability, including adding more internal combustion and plug-in hybrid vehicles to go with the slow-selling EVs. All told, the company expects to spend $830 million (800 million euros) on expanding its non-battery EV lineup in 2025.
There’s a lot of that sort of thing going around. Last year, General Motors and Ford lamented missing where the market actually is with too many too-expensive EVs and not enough hybrids. And over at Porsche’s sister brand Audi, a similar realization set in, to the point that the brand developed a new combustion engine vehicle architecture (called PPC) to go alongside the new EV-only PPE platform. That new platform will presumably be welcomed over at Porsche as well.
Now Audi has gone a little further, abandoning its almost-new nomenclature in the process. As naming conventions go, Audi at least tried to keep things a little logical when it told everyone last summer that henceforth, odd-numbered Audis—A3, A5, Q5, Q7, and so on—would be internal combustion or hybrids, and even-numbered Audis—A4, A6, Q6, Q8—would be electric, or e-tron.
This was the case when we went to see some of those new Audis in the studio last summer. There was an all-new gasoline-powered A5, which comes in a handsome fastback sedan or even more handsome Avant (station wagon) version, that won’t come to the US.
There’s also an all-new, fully electric A6, available as a sedan but also as a handsome fastback sedan and even more handsome Avant. This one also isn’t coming to America.
As of this week, things are back to where they used to be. Forget the odd and even distinction; for now, it means nothing again. A gasoline-powered A6 will break cover on March 3, Audi says. And as for names? “A” means a low floor, and “Q” means a high floor (i.e., SUV or crossover).