Audi announces taskforce for autonomous EVs
Audi launched a new project called Artemis. The core of the project is the development of new technologies for electric, highly automated driving with a concrete reference to the model. The first step is now to “develop a pioneering model quickly and unbureaucratically”.
Just two months after taking up the post of CEO at Audi, Markus Duesmann has mobilized a team of automotive and technology experts for this task, headed by Alex Hitzinger, who is a motorsport chief engineer and currently the driving force behind autonomous driving within the Group. The first assignment for the newly created high-tech task force is to develop a “highly efficient electric car that is to be on the road as early as 2024” and to create an ecosystem including new business models around the car.
The project is intended to complement the Volkswagen Group’s electric offensive with 75 planned electric models by 2029. “The question was obvious how we could realize additional high-tech benchmarks without jeopardizing the affordability of existing projects and at the same time take advantage of new opportunities in the markets,” said Duesmann. Artemis is intended to meet this requirement and become a “blueprint for the future agile development of automobiles throughout the Volkswagen Group”. In return, the team will be given great freedom and will be able to draw on the full resources of the entire Group. The project is being worked on both online and offline between Ingolstadt and the West Coast of the USA.
In Hitzinger, the project is headed by a motorsport expert who – like Duesmann, by the way – used to work as an engine designer in Formula 1 himself. Among other things, he built up the motorsport team at Porsche that won the Le Mans 24 Hours and the Endurance World Championship from 2015 to 2017. After three years at Apple in Silicon Valley, where he was in charge of product development for autonomous vehicles, Hitzinger returned to Volkswagen in 2019 – initially for autonomous driving and ID. Buzz at VW Commercial Vehicles, now to head Artemis.