Parts sharing isn’t a new thing, even for a premium brand like Audi. As far back as the 1970s, Audi provided components and engines to Porsche for the 924 and 944 sports cars, with modern examples including the three-row Q7 SUV, which shares its architecture with the Cayenne (as well as the Lamborghini Urus and Bentley Bentayga). That commonality between Volkswagen Group brands is unlikely to end any time soon; in fact, Audi CEO Gernot Döllner said the luxury brand would even leverage some of Porsche’s sporty platforms for its more enthusiastic models.
Audi Wants To Have Some More Fun
Audi Concept CAudi
Döllner told CarBuzz that it’s only natural for the automaker to turn to its parent company and sister brands for additional products and resources: “That’s one of the very big advantages for Audi being in Volkswagen Group.” The luxury brand sits above Volkswagen, Seat, and Skoda but below Porsche and Lamborghini in terms of vehicle price and market positioning, and as a result, it has helped develop a core lineup of platforms that can be used on both the low and the high end.
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For example, Döllner specifically called out the development of B-, C-, and D-segment “high-floor cars” as its responsibility, including the MLB Evo architecture that shows up under the aforementioned Q7 and Cayenne, as well as the Q6 e-tron’s Premium Platform Electric and forthcoming Q9’s Premium Platform Combustion – their respective Porsche equivalents include the Macan Electric and a rumored seven-seat, gas-powered SUV.
2025-2026 Audi Q5 Sportback ExteriorAudi
But with Audi focusing on mass-market vehicles with higher volumes (and therefore profit potential), the Ingolstadt-based automaker doesn’t have as much bandwidth to develop halo models. For that, it seems only fair for Porsche to step up and provide some engineering expertise to its corporate partner.
Sporty Audis Are ‘Definitely’ On The Way
The first such example is the Concept C, which Audi refers to internally as the C Sport. That retro-themed two-seater will use the same “mid-engined” platform as the next-generation Porsche 718 Boxster and Cayman EVs. Audi’s spiritual successor to the TT will retain the same battery layout as its Porsche cousins, with a compact stack behind the front seats enabling a low seating position and appropriately exotic sports car proportions.
We will definitely, as Audi, use platforms on the sporty side from Porsche and try to develop some synergies there.
–Gernot Döllner, CEO of Audi
It doesn’t sound as though the C Sport will be the only future Audi using Porsche’s sports car bones, Given the CEO’s comments, we wonder if the rumored successor to the R8 supercar might instead be based on the Modular Mid-Engine (MMB) platform found under the current 911 (which, despite the architecture’s name, is rear-engined). Modifying MMB to suit a flagship Audi could be relatively simple, expanding the wheelbase to move the engine toward the middle to make room for the Lamborghini Temerario’s hellish V8 (or the mechanically unrelated cross-plane, double-boosted four-liter from the current Audi RS 6).
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It’s also possible Porsche will contribute some of its engineering muscle to those aforementioned “mass-market” Audi cars. We could easily see the German companies collaborating once again on co-branded sporty vehicles like the RS 2 Avant of the 1990s. Porsche would need only to provide Audi with braking, suspension, and engineering tech to make a hot and heavy RS 5 GT or Performance trim that could go hunting for the BMW M3 CS and CSL.
