Audi Takes ‘Painful’ Decision to Close a Factory

While the parent company, Volkswagen Group, is still considering whether to close factories in Germany, Audi has taken this drastic decision in Belgium. The factory in Brussels will close up shop at the end of February. Consequently, the Q8 E-Tron and Q8 E-Tron Sportback are being wiped out from the lineup. Due to poor sales, the two large electric SUVs are not generating enough demand to keep the plant open.

Audi had tried to find a buyer for the factory but to no avail. There were rumors that Chinese automaker Nio was interested in acquiring the Brussels factory, but CEO William Li subsequently denied the reports in September. Reuters cites Gerd Walker, Audi board member and head of production, saying: “The decision to close the Brussels factory is painful. Personally, it was the toughest decision I’ve ever had to make in my professional career.”

The Q8 E-Tron started its life in 2018 when it debuted with just the E-Tron moniker to serve as Audi’s first series production global electric car. The swoopy Sportback derivative arrived about a year later. Both earned the “Q8” prefix at the end of 2022 when the two EVs underwent a mid-cycle facelift. The factory in Belgium’s capital has been making the Q8-badged models since December 2022. The last vehicles will be assembled on February 28, 2025, according to company spokesperson Peter D’hoore.

In 2023, Audi sold 49,001 units of the Q8 E-Tron, down 4.3% from the previous year. However, the Brussels site has a maximum annual capacity of 120,000 vehicles, so it’s easy to see why the math didn’t work out in favor of the electric SUV. Founded in 1949, the plant has a little over 3,000 employees and is claimed to be the “world’s first carbon-neutral high-volume production plant in the luxury segment.”

Audi had intended to go fully electric by 2033, but now it wants to stay “flexible,” per CEO Gernot Döllner. Staying within the VW Group, Bentley has pushed back its EV-only agenda a couple of times already. It initially said it would abandon cars with gas engines by 2030 before readjusting its goal for 2033. The latest plan calls for an exclusively electric lineup by 2035.

The core VW brand wanted to be completely electric in Europe as early as 2033. However, it recently admitted that the current-generation Golf could stay until 2035. That’s when the EU plans to ban sales of new cars with harmful emissions, effectively ending the internal combustion engine. Whatever the Group has in store for the main VW brand, logic tells us that SEAT/Cupra and Skoda will follow suit.