Audi SUVs – from Q2 to Q8 – heading for 50% of Audi sales

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Sales of SUVs at Audi has risen inexorably in recent years, and now Audi’s head of sales and marketing is forecasting half of all Audi sales will soon be SUVs.

The car market goes through fashions and fads just like the rest of the world, from saloons to hatchbacks and coupes to shooting brakes all having their moment in the sun. 

But nothing seems to float buyers’ boats these days – from budget brand to ultra luxury – quite like and SUV.

From the cheap as chips Dacia Duster through to the Range Rover, Bentley Bentayga and Rolls Royce Cullinan, every part of the market is seeing an inexorable rise in demand for high riders, despite their relative lack of dynamism and higher cost.

And nowhere is the demonstrated more clearly than at Audi, which currently sells just four SUVs.

In fact, just a decade ago, all Audi had to offer was the Q7, and total SUV sales were just 6 per cent of the total, and even by 2011 – with the Audi Q5 having been on the market for a couple of years – SUV sales volume was at a relatively modest 18 per cent.

But by then Audi had already realised that SUVs were a licence to print money, and the addition of the Q3 in 2011 and the Q2 in 2016 has seen SUVs now account for a third of all Audi sales. In the US they account for almost half.

So it’s no surprise that with the planned rollout of three new SUVs in the next three years that Dietmar Voggenreiter, Audi’s head of sales and marketing, says he expects SUV sales to be 50 per cent of Audi’s sales worldwide in the future. 

With the new Audi Q8 Flagship launching in 2018, the Audi Q4 coupe SUV – a production take on the TT Offroad Concept – expected to arrive in 2019, and the Tesla-baiting electric Audi e-tron SUV (which was going to be the Q6 but apparently isn’t going to be) probably also here by next year, it’s no surprise SUVs are rapidly heading for 50 per cent of Audi’s volume.

But how long will it be before car makers see no point in producing anything other than the, very profitable, SUV?