It will be the last RS6 with a combustion engine.
When the Audi RS6 Avant finally arrived in the United States for the 2021 model year, everyone here at Motor1.com was excited. Americans finally got the chance to experience one of the fastest and most capable station wagons in the world, and we are now even happier to learn a new generation RS6 Avant is in the cards. Of course, it won’t come soon, but it’s good to know the speedy wagon from Ingolstadt has a future.
The current generation of the RS6 Avant will be retired towards the middle of the decade and its successor should arrive in late 2025 or early 2026. In an interview with Wheels, former head of Audi Sport and current head of R&D at Audi, Stephan Reil, basically confirmed the new performance wagon will be powered by a hybrid powertrain. Additional details are not known, though the way the RS6 Avant will evolve is likely the model’s largest transformation in history so far.
“Of course this [hybridization] is the way to go, in the next generation I can tell you it will have more hybridization,” Reil told the publication. “This is our way toward fully electrified cars.” To a certain extent, even today’s RS6 Avant is electrified – the powerful 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 is supported by a mild-hybrid system – but its successor will rely on plug-in hybrid technology.
When the C9-gen Audi RS6 Avant arrives in 2026, it will be the last speedy wagon from the company to feature a combustion engine. We don’t know whether there will be a V8 under the hood, but Stephan Reil told Wheels its successor will be purely electric. The executive looked back at the evolution of the previous generations of RS6 Avants when speaking about the future models.
