Ionity has specialized its charging network along Europe’s main roadways. The joint venture, in which the Volkswagen Group has a stake through its Porsche and Audi brands, is active in 29 European countries. Ionity plans to increase the number of high-power 350 kW charging points from 1,500 to around 7,000 by 2025. Moreover, Ionity is now building its fast-charging stations near major cities and busy main roads as well as along freeways. As a result, the number of charging locations will increase from just under 400 to over 1,000. Ionity also plans to expand many of its existing stations – depending on how heavily customers use them. It will now design all new sites with six to twelve charging points from the beginning. Ionity only uses green power for its HPC stations.

Following the success of the first Audi charging hub in Nuremberg, Audi is expanding its urban charging concept.

Cities like Zürich, Berlin, Salzburg, Munich, Frankfurt am Main, and Bremen now have premium fast-charging stations. Each station has four charging points and also welcomes drivers of other brands. However, Audi drivers benefit exclusively from a free reservation feature using the myAudi app. The pilot site in Nuremberg also has a lounge where users can relax, do some mobile work, or enjoy a snack. A concierge is on-site to assist. Customers at other Audi charging hubs can reach the concierge by phone; Audi cooperates with different partners here. The first Audi charging hub outside Europe has now opened in Japan’s capital city, the Tokyo Metropolis.

The Audi charging hub is aimed specifically at people in urban areas who do not have a home charging option. Over 60 percent of users are regular customers.

Audi customers can use the green power solutions offered by Volkswagen subsidiary Elli for home charging. As a first step, trading partners put interested customers in touch with a professional electrician who assesses the situation on-site and provides tips on integrating the existing infrastructure and a home photovoltaic system. The e-tron charging system compact and connect, along with Audi wall boxes, are available. There is also a solution for drivers of company cars: The partner company LOGPAY transmits the charging data to the fleet management system, and the costs are later reimbursed through the company’s billing system. The solution requires a Charge & Fuel card and the Audi Wallbox Pro1.

An ideal charging experience needs more than just the right vehicle and infrastructure. How long it takes for an electric car to charge also depends on the maximum charging speed and the battery size of the model, as well as a range of external factors such as ambient temperature, the use of other country-specific plugs, and the use of the preconditioning feature (for example remote-controlled air conditioning of the vehicle). The e-tron route planner shows the driver the ideal route; when the driver follows the recommendations, the system ensures that the car battery has the right temperature when the driver arrives at the charging point. The ideal battery charge level is between 20 and 80 percent.

Cell chemistry, charging power, and control systems are mainly responsible for the characteristics of electric car batteries, which differentiate one battery from another. Battery development is, therefore, a top priority at Audi.

Audi’s battery testing center in Gaimersheim, 7 km northwest of its headquarters in Ingolstadt, ensures an ideal balance between energy density and charging capacity in the battery cells used in the e-tron models. The cell technology experts there are working to strike the perfect balance between energy density, charging time, durability, and safety. Generally, the higher the energy density, the longer it takes to charge. So customers can enjoy the shortest possible charging time, Audi is focusing on developing a control system that enables constant fast charging despite the high energy density.

Each vehicle project entails a variety of service life and fast charging tests on several hundred cells. The cells must run through various charging and load profiles that the technicians perform in climatic chambers at temperatures between -30 and +60 °C. To assess the cells’ aging phenomena, they are exposed to high temperatures for around a year, allowing Audi to simulate an in-car service life of up to 15 years. Service life test stands in Gaimersheim also enable the technicians to speed up reconstructed mileage scenarios of about 300,000 kilometers. Other tests include crash and overcharge testing, as well as various safety tests. As such, the battery cells meet the highest service life and safety standards – decisive criteria for sustainable use.

The first Audi battery assembly facility began operation at the Brussels site in 2018 with the launch of the first electric car from Audi, the e-tron. The battery assembly facility in Ingolstadt went into operation with the start of production of the Audi Q6 e-tron series.

The Audi site in Győr, Hungary, is also electric and is the world’s largest engine manufacturing plant. Audi Hungaria builds the drive systems for the PPE and makes stators and transmission parts. It also assembles the axles for the PPE, which are then transported by rail to Ingolstadt. Product testing also takes place in Győr.

Audi and the other Volkswagen Group brands cooperate with energy suppliers to promote the expansion of renewable energies. With the help of various partner companies, new wind and solar farms will be built in several European countries by the end of 2025, generating around five terawatt hours of additional green power. This figure corresponds to an installed capacity of about 250 new wind turbines.

Audi plans to increase the share of electricity its partners generate from renewable sources in conjunction with an additional increase in the share of electric cars on the road. The partnership with energy suppliers also intends to cover charging processes that aren’t yet carried out with green power today. In this way, Audi is actively involved in ensuring that its customers are on the move with green energy in the future.

Audi has been electrifying Berlin since 2019. Like the Audi charging hub, the multi-use storage system on Berlin’s EUREF Campus, with its capacity of 1.9 MWh, uses second-life lithium-ion from Audi development vehicles. In researching intelligent networking to promote the energy revolution, the site acts as a real-world laboratory by testing various interaction scenarios between electric cars and the energy grid. With a mere 20 second-life batteries, the EUREF storage system already meets 0.1 percent of Germany’s frequency stabilization needs.

Audi identifies the greatest energy-economy potential in controlled charging at surplus times, i.e., periods when the grid has a surplus of renewable energy. As part of an ongoing research trial in Berlin, 18 virtual vehicles that drive for three hours and stand unused for 21 hours during a simulated day are charged intelligently using actual electricity transactions on the power exchange. The final vision is to achieve a symbiosis between electric cars and the power grid. Experts from Audi demonstrated that in a scenario where renewable energies and e-mobility achieve 100% penetration, 90 percent of driving-related energy demand could be covered by surpluses of renewable energies.