Audi to offer electric cars in 5-10 years
FRANKFURT, GERMANY - Audi, the luxury unit of Volkswagen, sees great opportunities in electric cars and will offer automobiles with no exhaust emissions within ten years, its top executive told a German weekly.
Rupert Stadler told Welt am Sonntag in an interview that he expects diesel and battery technology to dominate in the coming five to ten years.
"By then we will offer cars without exhaust emissions," Stadler said.
Asked if Audi was not lagging domestic rivals Mercedes and BMW in the development of lithium-ion batteries that are more powerful than batteries used now in hybrids, Stadler said Audi's research capacities were larger than those of its German competitors.
"Electric cars offer great opportunities, which we have already seized on," Stadler said without elaborating.
Developing fuel-saving technology tops the agenda of Germany's car industry in an effort to fulfill stricter emission regulations and conserve fuel.
BMW has said it would decide this year whether to build an electric vehicle, while U.S. carmaker General Motors plans to roll out its Chevrolet Volt plug-in electric car in 2010.
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Americans Keep Using Less and Less Electricity
WASHINGTON - By Justin Fox
Economic growth picked up a little in the U.S. in 2017. But electricity use fell, according to data released recently by the Energy Information Administration. It's now been basically flat for more than a decade:
Measured on a per-capita basis, electricity use is in clear decline, and is already back to the levels of the mid-1990s.
Sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
*Includes small-scale solar generation from 2014 onward
I constructed these charts to go all the way back to 1949 in part because I can (that's how far back the EIA data series goes) but…
