Artemis rumoured to be six months behind schedule

Audis’ trailblazer project Artemis, announced last year, is already significantly behind schedule according to a media report. This is also said to have an impact on the planned, highly automated electric sedan, which is now reportedly not to be launched until 2025 instead of 2024.

This is reported by Business Insider with reference to insiders. The new Audi CEO Markus Duesmann had launched the project in 2020. The declared goal was to develop new technologies around electric, highly automated driving with concrete model reference. At the moment, the software is apparently a sticking point. “It’s related to the current development maturity of the new software,” a person familiar with the process is quoted as saying.

The “Landjet”, as the project is called for the electric limousine, will not be launched on the market until 2025 at the earliest, three independent sources are now said to have confirmed. An Audi spokesperson had explained that the current target was “the end of 2024” – this was the year that both Duesmann and VW Group CEO Herbert Diess had mentioned.

The delay to at least 2025 is due to other reasons besides the software. But the main issue, according to the report, is that the “ramp-up curve within the new Car.Software.Org was too flat”. The “Landjet” is supposed to run version 2.0 of the operating system VW.OS for the first time, but according to a VW manager, the further development from 1.2 via 1.3 to 2.0 is “not yet running at the speed hoped for”, according to the “Business Insider”.

The fact that the new software is not progressing so quickly is apparently also due to the problems with the Golf 8 and ID.3, which tied up capacities for a long time. In addition, “there was cultural friction and thus time loss” in setting up the Car.Software.Org from specialists of the various group brands.

Recently, Manager Magazin had already reported that the Artemis project would be restarted. After the ousting of Artemis managing director Alex Hitzinger, the new Audi board member for development Oliver Hoffmann would be responsible for the project. According to Artemis GmbH, which was founded in December, this is not an unusual process: “Artemis was founded as an incubator and accelerator,” said a spokesperson in February. The first model “with valuable ideas from this tech company” will be launched in 2024 – mind you, “with valuable ideas”, built by Artemis, not Artemis.

With reporting by Sebastian Schaal, Germany.

businessinsider.de (in German)