Audi will replace the TT with an electric sports car

The Audi TT as you know is going to change, and change soon. Speaking at a Very Important Business Meeting, Audi boss Bram Schot announced that “in a few years, we will replace the TT with a new emotive model”.

Said ‘emotive’ new model will be in the same price range as the current TT – so circa £40k for one with a modicum of power – but be rather different. It’ll be a fully electric sports car.

Yes, it’s 2019, and all your heroes are dead. Audi – and the wider car world of course – is going all-in on electric. Audi itself notes how the upcoming e-tron GT will showcase the brand’s ability to make sporty, electric cars.

Indeed, the company wants to sell one million electrified cars each year by the middle of the next decade, which is quite a lot of electrified cars to sell by 2025. “Our core product, the automobile, should contribute to the progress of our society,” Schot notes.

So, farewell, combustion-engined Audi TT, it’s been emotional. But are we also saying farewell to the combustion-engined Audi R8 too? According to Schot, we might just be.

“Focusing also means leaving out. For example, the R8 sports car. Do we need a successor with a combustion engine? Does this fit in with our vision? The discussion will give us an answer to that,” Schot said in his speech.

We’ve long suspected the next R8 will be electric – what with Audi’s strategy, earlier R8 e-tron prototypes, emissions regs and so forth – but it doesn’t make it any easier a pill to swallow. That nat-asp V10 is quite simply one of the finest powertrains ever built by human hands. Here's why.

The 2020s will offer a very different sports car and supercar landscape…