THE NEW MODEL DIARY JULY-DECEMBER 2015
AUDI
It’s a big second half of the year for Audi, with the arrival of its secondgeneration hero car, the R8. Sharing much under the skin with Lamborghini’s Huracan, the 2015 R8 will be available with the same 5.2-litre naturally aspirated directinjection V10, in two states of tune: a mere 397kW in the poverty pack, and 449kW in the one you really should have, the V10 Plus.
A seven-speed S tronic transmission and quattro allwheel drive are also featured.
Weight is down 50kg, to 1454kg, which helps the hi-po version reach 100km/h in just 3.2 seconds. The body is still a space frame construction, largely aluminium and now with some carbon-fibrereinforced plastics as well.
The second-generation Q7 also arrives in December, with a claimed 325kg reduction in mass, which would take the volumeselling 200kW 3.0-litre turbodiesel TDi down to a svelte two tonnes.
Audi claims average fuel consumption for the 3.0TDi of just 5.7L/100km, a 23 per cent reduction on the current model. That would be on a very steep downhill slope, with a tailwind — as would its claimed 0-100km/h acceleration time of just 6.3 seconds, one suspects.
A 245kW 3.0-litre supercharged petrol V6 will also be available, as will the Q7 e-tron quattro, a plugin petrol/electric hybrid, a little further down the
