Audi’s launch into the future: a promising sustainability strategy

As festival season continues, we were excited to be taken along for a day with Audi, who are in the midst of a very promising sustainability overhaul. The company has been making moves to increase its sustainability practices for a while now, but because we at ellectric are all about the future, there are a few projects in particular that caught our eye. 

Audi turns to the future 

Reportedly, Audi’s goal is to become the leading provider of sustainable mobility. As of 2026, the brand will only be releasing all-electric models onto the market, and to achieve this ambitious goal, Audi therefore has to optimise all the links in its value chain and commit to the expansion of renewable energy. Again, this is quite the overhaul, but Audi is committed to ensuring sustainability along the entire value chain, assuming responsibility for its employees, the environment, and society, and making sustainable management an integral part of all its decisions and products

Sustainable production 

As with any sustainability topic, this of course starts with production, and one of Audi’s biggest goals is to incrementally reduce vehicle-specific carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030. To be able to reach that ambitious goal, it will also have to change its upstream supply chain processes. The goal is certainly not unrealistic, as Audi was able to save over 480,000 tons of carbon equivalents (CO2e) in 2021 thanks to renewable energy, low-carbon materials, and secondary materials in its supply chain.

We already wrote about circular economy and its applications to the mobility industry recently, so we’re very happy to hear about Audi’s circular economy strategy and its intention to establish more and more closed material cycles. This means that raw materials will be reintroduced into the production process once they are no longer being used. A good example is car glass: in a pilot project, Audi and its partners are turning old car glass into new windows for the Audi Q4 e-tron.

Another vital aspect of sustainable production are the emissions of production sites. The Mission:Zero programme is Audi’s roadmap to sustainable production and logistics with the ultimate goal of carbon-neutral production sites by 2025. Audi Hungaria has reached this target already in 2020, and Audi Brussels became the world’s first carbon-neutral high-volume production plant in the premium segment in 2018, so it’s definitely promising. At the Neckarsulm site , assembly of the Audi e-tron GT is also net carbon-neutral, while at the Ingolstadt site, Audi has been using processed wastewater as service water since 2019.

Audi Environmental Foundation Projects 

One aspect of Audi’s sustainability strategy that we particularly have our eye on is its funding projects, organised by the Audi Environmental Foundation. One of them in particular is with the German-Indian startup Nunam, a Berlin-based non-profit that is putting three electric rickshaws on India’s roads. These rickshaws are powered by second-life batteries taken from test vehicles in the Audi e-tron test fleet, and were developed with the training team at Audi’s Neckarsulm site. The electric rickshaws are to enable women to participate in the rickshaw trade while providing them with a safe mode of transportation – and we even got to ride one of the prototypes ourselves. 

The start-up’s primary goal is to develop ways to use old batteries as second-life power storage systems, thus both extending their lives and using resources more efficiently.

“Car batteries are designed to last the life of the car. But even after their initial use in a vehicle, they still have a lot of their power. For vehicles with lower range and power requirements, as well as lower overall weight, they are extremely promising. In our second-life project, we reuse batteries from electric cars in electric vehicles; you might call it electric mobility ‘lite’. In this way, we’re trying to find out how much power the batteries can still provide in this demanding use case.” – Prodip Chatterjee, co-founder at Nunam

Other notable projects include the NGO Litro de Luz Brasil supported by the Audi Environmental Foundation together with Audi do Brasil. In the Amazon region, these project partners are providing three villages that do not have electricity with solar lanterns, which will raise their living standards and make them safer at night. These are both great examples of a big mobility player using their platform and resources to try and make the world a better place. 

Audi charging hubs 

The issue of charging infrastructure has been a prevailing topic in sustainability mobility of the future for some time now, including on ellectric with our Hopium interview as well as of course, our circularity piece. This is why we are closely following the development of Audi’s charging hub project. After a successful initial pilot phase, the brand is now opening a second compact Audi charging hub pilot site in downtown Zurich, followed by sites in Salzburg and Berlin. Additional sites are slated to open in Germany in 2023 and mid-2024. 

The pilot essentially consisted of some 3100 charges recorded at the Audi Nuremberg charging site, one of the world’s first quick-charging stations, with six reservable high-power charging points and an average of 24 charges at about 800 kWh per day. Additionally, the near 200-square-metre barrier-free lounge that boasts a 40-square-metre terrace above the charging cubes was visited by an average of 35 customers every day. The comfortable charging and lounge experience, reservable per app and with an attractive catering offering, has garnered overwhelmingly positive feedback from users.

The idea is simple: so-called cubes that serve as the energy storage system, which can be assembled and disassembled in short order at existing sites. Power is stored in recycled lithium-ion batteries, known as second-life batteries and taken from dismantled test vehicles. This system means the Audi charging hub’s battery-storage solution brings sustainable quick-charging infrastructure where the electric grid is not enough. 

With all of these projects (and more), we are very much looking forward to the future at Audi, and to see the impact that these sustainability practices will have on the mobility industry as a whole. As we have already said, there is absolutely no reason why luxury mobility shouldn’t also be sustainable and ethical.

Pictures: Audi / Tobias Sagmeister for ellectric
Text: Britta Reineke