AUDI, Audi

• AUDI’s second EV will be a large SUV aimed squarely at the Chinese market.
• Dubbed the E SUV, it’s only a concept for now, but the production version will likely look the same.
• Confused about that brand name? There’s an explanation.

AUDI is kicking things into high gear. After starting production of the E5 Sportback just two months ago, the company that made the world double-check the spelling of its name earlier this year is already prepping a second model.

The AUDI E SUV concept went on stage late last week at the Auto Guangzhou 2025 show in China, signaling the peculiarly-named automaker’s intentions of building a large battery-powered SUV that has nothing to do with the German Audi brand that we’ve known for decades.

Photo by: Audi

Despite it being billed as a show car, the nearly 200-inch-long EV has all the right ingredients to go into production with little to no changes, just as its sedan brother did in September. Usually, car manufacturers don’t give out technical specifications on concepts that have no chance of becoming reality. The AUDI E SUV, however, has plenty of specs. According to the company, it’s powered by two electric motors–one at the front and one at the rear–that make a combined 670 horsepower (500 kilowatts).

There’s also a 109-kilowatt-hour battery pack that enables 435 miles (700 kilometers) of range on the rather optimistic CLTC cycle. That should equate to about 491 miles on the EPA cycle.

Thanks to the 800-volt platform that underpins it, the AUDI E SUV concept can regain up to 199 miles of range after a 10-minute fast-charging session, but–again–that’s on the CLTL cycle.

It might not look like it, but this car is a big deal for AUDI. Despite being spelled like someone forgot to switch off Caps Lock before signing off on a new project, this is genuinely Audi’s attempt at regaining lost sales in one of the biggest car markets in the world: China. After decades of having access to a handful of minimally modified imports, it turns out that Chinese car buyers don’t want the same things as European or American customers. So they’ve turned to the local offerings, which are, by and large, more technologically advanced than what the old guard can provide.

Gallery: AUDI E SUV concept

So Audi, the German automaker that made a name for itself for its Quattro all-wheel drive system, has partnered with China’s SAIC to develop cars specifically for China. The first one was the E5 Sportback, and the second will be this EV SUV, which will go on sale next year. A third will follow.

It might still be called AUDI, but the brand’s cars don’t have the famed four-ring logo on the front. The two EVs also have nothing in common with Audi’s own vehicle platforms. Instead, the E SUV concept is based on the Advanced Digitized Platform (ADP) that was developed jointly with SAIC and is more suited to the Chinese market.

So far, Audi’s idea of disguising a new wave of EVs under the same-but-different name seems to be paying off. The E5 Sportback banked over 10,000 orders in the first 30 minutes of pre-sales, which is more than decent. We’ll just have to wait and see if an SUV will be able to move the needle even further in the right direction.