Audi, a premium brand of Germany's Volkswagen, has begun the manufacture of electric motors for a new EV platform that will be used in its Q6 e-tron model.
The Premium Platform Electric (PPE) is a modular electric car platform being developed by VW Group brands Audi and Porsche.
The new facility in Gyor, Hungary will have the capacity to produce 2000 electric motors a day to be used in the PPE platform that will power the Audi Q6 e-tron and, in the future, the Porsche Macan series.
“Gyor is predestined for the production of these highly compact and efficient electric motors for the PPE,” says Audi CEO Gernot Döllner.
The PPE will eventually be used to support an even wider range of rear- and all-wheel drive models with various performance levels. Volkswagen says the platform's electric drivetrain will enable ranges as high as 600km.
The Gyor facility will also assemble the axles for the PPE and build the drive system for the Audi Q8 e-tron, as well as electric motors that will be used in Volkswagen models using the MEB+ platform for its smaller, cheaper vehicles.
In 2022 Audi began training around 2,000 employees at the the Gyor facility in preparation for PPE production.
The start of production at the facility is a key milestone in the ramp-up of production of the Audi Q6 e-tron, which is scheduled to start at the firm's Ingolstadt headquarters in Germany at the end of the year. This will be the first time an electric model is manufactured at the facility, which traditionally makes the Audi Q2, A3, A4, and A5 models.
Audi has has set up its own battery assembly facility and trained over 8000 employees from its technical development and sales departments in Ingolstadt, as well as adding 500 jobs in production, ahead of the launch of the Q6 e-tron series.
Under its Vorsprung 2030 corporate strategy Audi will end the production of vehicles with combustion engines by 2033.
Audi will introduce more than 20 new models by 2025 – more than 10 of which will be electric. By 2030, every Audi manufacturing facility worldwide will produce at least one fully electric model.
The PPE platform is the Volkswagen Group's first new electric platform since the Modular Electric Drive Matrix (MEB), which it began using in 2012.
In the longer term, the Volkswagen Group plans to switch to the Scalable Systems Platform (SSP), a single future backbone with integrated electric and electronics architecture that it says will form the basis for more than 40mn vehicles across all brands.
Tom is an experienced business writer, specialised in the energy transition
Tom is passionate about Electric Vehicles and how Tesla, BYD, Rivian, Lucid and others are transforming automotive
