Audi’s Belgian factory, which pioneered the EV production of the brand with the e-tron, of which 160 000 were shipped worldwide, delivered on Wednesday the first of its successor, now baptized Q8 e-tron.

In the meantime, the Brussels factory is preparing to start building the smaller Q4 e-tron too, as confirmed in October. In summer, the daily production of seventy vehicles of this popular model will start to a total of 40 000 by 2026.

Carbon-neutral production

The Belgian plant has had carbon-neutral production since 2018 and is a pioneer for Audi’s strategic environmental program Mission Zero. According to Audi, it was even the world’s first certified carbon-neutral plant for mass production in the top segment.

On the factory’s rooftop, there are 107 000 square meters of solar panels, providing up to 9 000 MWh, the equivalent of 90 000 fully charged Q8 e-trons.

‘Valuable pioneering work’

“Brussels has done valuable pioneering work. We learn from our experience gathered after the worldwide delivery of approximately 160,000 Audi e-tron,” says Gerd Walker, Member of the Board of Management for Production and Logistics at Audi AG.

“This applies not only to the transformation but also to the electrification of other locations, for example, during the construction of battery production in Ingolstadt.”

Q4 e-tron production from Summer

In Summer, Audi Brussels will start to produce also the Q4 e-tron, which today is exclusively built in the factory in Eastern Germany of Zwickau, where the Volkswagen ID.3 is manufactured.

In December 2021, the news broke that Audi Brussels had applied to produce the Q4 e-tron, the popular SUV and currently the cheapest battery-electric model in the Audi range. The brand was looking for extra production capacity to meet the demand for the model.

Initially, it appeared that Audi would not grant the Brussels plant its second model next to the larger e-tron SUV. But the success of the Q4 e-tron (of which in Belgium more than 7 000 are ordered already) made Audi decide to find extra production capacity rapidly to shorten delivery delays.

Producing the Q4 e-tron on the same line as the Q8 e-tron will require some investments to be made. The electric Q4 is based on Volkswagen’s fully electric MEB platform, compared to the e-tron’s MLB evo, a reworked combustion engine platform. The batteries for this model will be delivered from Germany.