Audi is the Volkswagen Group's premium brand and the lead company of its Brand Group Progressive, which also reports Bentley, Lamborghini and Ducati. Its corporate history is broken in several places. August Horch founded the company that became Audi in Zwickau in 1909, and the Audi name was registered in 1910 only because a court stopped him using his own surname. In 1932 Audi merged with DKW, Horch and Wanderer's car division to form Auto Union, which is where the four interlocking rings come from. The Saxon plants were expropriated after the Second World War and the company was struck from the Chemnitz register in 1948; managers who had fled west re-founded Auto Union GmbH in Ingolstadt in 1949. Daimler-Benz bought 88 percent of it in 1958, could not fix a business still built around two-stroke engines, and it passed to Volkswagen in 1965. For years afterwards Audi was a sensible brand living in the shadow of Mercedes-Benz and BMW. One engineering decision in 1980 changed that.
The quattro decision
Under Ferdinand Piëch, who ran development from 1975 and chaired the Board of Management from 1988, Audi showed the quattro at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1980: permanent all-wheel drive with two manually lockable differentials in a turbocharged coupe, at a time when the industry treated all-wheel drive as an off-road feature. Rather than argue the case in brochures, Audi took it rallying. The car won the World Rally Championship manufacturers' title in 1982, the drivers' title with Hannu Mikkola in 1983 and both titles with Stig Blomqvist in 1984, and Walter Röhrl set a Pikes Peak record with the Sport quattro S1 E2 in 1987. That run is what turned "Vorsprung durch Technik", a slogan coined in 1971, into something customers would pay for. The same pattern repeated on the circuit: 13 wins at the 24 Hours of Le Mans between 2000 and 2014, including the first for a diesel car with the R10 TDI.
The economics of the shared platform
Modern Audi's financial logic is that it does not pay for premium engineering alone. Group architectures do most of the work: MLB Evo for longitudinal-engine models, MEB for entry electric cars, and the 800-volt Premium Platform Electric that Audi co-developed with Porsche and that underpins the Q6 e-tron, the A6 e-tron and the Porsche Macan Electric. The A3 shares its underpinnings with cheaper Volkswagen and Skoda models; the Q8, the Porsche Cayenne and the Lamborghini Urus share MLB Evo. Audi adds its own body design, interior, chassis tuning and lighting, and prices above the related models. At about 1.6 million cars a year, that sharing is not a luxury but the condition for funding a new electric architecture at all.
Dieselgate was Audi's scandal too
The 3.0-litre V6 TDI at the centre of the United States case against Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche was Audi's engine, and Audi engineers were found to have originated defeat-device software used more widely in the group. A settlement worth at least 1.2 billion dollars covering about 78,000 of those vehicles received final approval in May 2017. In October 2018 Munich II prosecutors issued an ~$904 million (800 million euro) order against AUDI AG, consisting of a ~$5.65 million (5 million euro) fine and ~$898 million (795 million euros) of disgorged profit, and Audi accepted it. CEO Rupert Stadler had already resigned that year after being arrested; he was convicted of fraud by negligence in 2023. Volkswagen Group put its cumulative diesel cost at ~$31.9 billion (28.2 billion euros) as of October 2018. In July 2021 the European Commission separately fined the Volkswagen Group, covering Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche, about $567 million (502 million euros) for colluding with BMW and Daimler on diesel emissions cleaning technology.
Where Audi stands now
Audi Group revenue was ~$74 billion (65,503 million euros) in 2025, up from 64,532 million, but operating profit fell to ~$3.81 billion (3,371 million euros) and the operating margin to 5.1 percent, against a 14 percent long-term target. United States tariffs cost ~$1.36 billion (1.2 billion euros) on their own, with further charges for CO2 compliance provisions, the German agreement for the future, and the rescheduling of a shared group electric platform. Profit after tax still rose to ~$5.22 billion (4,617 million euros) and net cash flow to 3,422 million. Deliveries fell 2.9 percent to 1,623,551 cars, with China down 5 percent to 617,514 and North America down 12.2 percent, while fully electric deliveries hit a record 223,032, up 36 percent. Lamborghini remains the margin outlier at 24.0 percent.
The strategy has already been revised once
The 2021 Vorsprung 2030 plan committed Audi to stop developing new combustion engines and to launch only fully electric models from 2026, with combustion gone by 2033. In June 2025 CEO Gernot Döllner dropped the fixed end date, saying combustion and plug-in hybrid models would remain in the range for roughly another seven to ten years. The 2026 plan reflects that: a Q9 flagship SUV and a third-generation Q7 aimed largely at the United States, an A2 e-tron entry electric family, a reworked Q4 e-tron, a new RS 5, and for China the A6L e-tron plus the E7X from the China-exclusive AUDI brand Audi runs with SAIC. Guidance for 2026 is 63 to ~$76.8 billion (68 billion euros) of revenue at a 6 to 8 percent margin. Audi also entered Formula 1 in 2026 as the Audi Revolut F1 Team, having taken full ownership of Sauber, with its own power unit built at Neuburg.
