Project Artemis
Audi shoots for the stars.
AUDI’S ANNOUNCEMENT OF Project Artemis couldn’t have come at a worst time. It happened in late May last year, around the time many carmakers were emerging a little blearyeyed from factory shutdowns imposed as part of measures to curb the spread of COVID-19.
The talk on everyone’s lips back then was how badly the pandemic would affect their bottom line for 2020 and how quick, if at all, the recovery would be.
Understandably, the news of Project Artemis got lost in the hubbub, which is sad because it’s incredibly exciting. Audi’s then newly installed CEO Markus Duesmann announced he would be creating a business division that would report to him directly, tasked to “develop a pioneering model for Audi quickly and unbureaucratically”. Which we take to mean developing a car (or cars) with all the gusto and can-do spirit of a start-up, but with the virtually limitless clout of Audi and parent company the Volkswagen Group behind it.
The man tasked with heading that global team is Alex Hitzinger, the mastermind behind Porsche’s triumphant return to top-flight endurance racing in 2015 and who, up until 2018, was a senior member of Apple’s self-driving electric car team.
There are no details on when Project Artemis will yield its first car or what form it could take, but it’s a safe bet that it would be in the ultrapremium segment, according to a few nuggets revealed by Audi’s design chief Marc Lichte a couple of months ago.
But what of a spiritual successor to its innovative, frugal (and expensive, which pretty much led to its sales failure) aluminium-bodied A2 city car of the early 2000s?
After all, it plays right into Hitzinger’s expertise in Mobility as a Service (car-sharing, basically) and Project Artemis’s remit of “utilising new opportunities in the markets”.
Audi’s then newly installed CEO Markus Duesmann announced he would be creating a business division that would report to him directly.