Audi Korea to adopt new badging system

Audi Korea announced Thursday that it will introduce a brand new badging system, dubbed Dynamic Badge, by end of June to provide consumers with a more pragmatic assessment of a car’s performance.

The new badging involves a series of calculations using a car’s 0 to 100 kilometers per hour acceleration time in order to depict a number that indicates the approximate acceleration the driver will experience.

Compared to the current method, which merely identifies the engine displacement like in the 2.0 TDI, this will allow customers a more practical measurement for comparison, the carmaker said.

The first model to adopt the new badging is Audi’s high-performance diesel sedan, the Audi A7 55 TDI Quattro, which will be launched later this month.

Korea is the second market to have the new system following its first adoption in China. Audi plans to incorporate the new badging into all models globally except for its high-performance lineup ― such as S, RS and R8 ― and the A8 L W12.

New technologies, such as turbochargers, permit engines that have the same or even smaller displacement to produce higher maximum output and torque, meaning that an engine’s displacement is not as useful, nor logical, for accurately evaluating a car’s performance.

The steadily growing market for fully electric cars and hybrids also makes engine displacement an incompetent standard. Audi’s new system will promote a more objective value that makes sense for any type of car, the company said.

Along these lines, the use of gravitational acceleration, was especially important for making the number as standardized as possible.

After converting 100 kilometers per hour to meters per second, that number is divided by the car’s 0-100 time, which is then divided again by g, or 9.8 meters per second squared ― the result is a decimal number between zero and one.

Then on the assumption that 1g is equal to 100, the result is rounded up or down to the nearest multiple of five, which is the number that finally gets used as the Dynamic Badge.

By Kim Joo-hyun (jhk@heraldcorp.com)