Audi plans an electric SUV
Established premium car makers are taking the challenge from Tesla seriously. The Californian electric car company â" which is rumoured to be in talks with Apple about producing an 'i-car' â" will follow its highly-praised Model S sedan with a crossover Model X. Now from Germany comes the news that Audi is planning a pure electric plug-in SUV crossover based on the new Q7 that will appear later this year.
Said to be called the Q8 e-tron, this model will adopt the technology from the stillborn R8 e-tron sports car and be built on the Volkswagen Group's MLB platform for the next generation of large cars with longitudinally-mounted engines.
Meanwhile, Telsa has announced that it plans a 'gigafactory' in the southwest United States to make 500,000 lithium-ion battery packs a year by 2020. It says that it expects the greater scale of battery production to reduce unit costs by up to 30 per cent. Panasonic, which currently supplies lithium-ion cells to Telsa, is considering investing in the new plant.
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