So it looks like farewell to Audi’s bizarre taste for overhanging engines.

If German press reports are true, which seems highly likely, bringing the future development of the MLB platform to an end signals a complete break with an engineering quirk that dates back to Audi’s roots in the Auto Union and NSU brands.

Audi’s traditional layout is a longitudinally mounted transmission positioned between the front wheels, with the engine mounted ahead of that. But while having the engine overhanging the front wheels might not have been a significant issue in the days of lightweight, small-capacity engines, it became much more of an issue from the 1980s onwards as engines got more powerful and heavier.


These natively developed Audis were for a long time roundly criticised for poor handling, poor steering feel and a nose-heavy ride - most of which was a direct consequence of having the mass of the engine in the extremity of the car’s nose.


For example, there might have been little to touch Audi’s prescient 1986 80 and 90 models, the build quality, craftsmanship and styling of which still stands today, but those heavy iron-block four and five-cylinder engines mounted in the nose were metaphorical boat anchors.

The 1994 Audi A4 still had the same layout, but it had double wishbone suspension up front (highly unusual then for a front-drive car) and lighter V6 engines, rather than the huge in-line five-pot, and the result was far, far better. But in comparison to rear-drive BMW and Mercedes of the period, the Audi was, in terms of pure driving ability, still a long way behind class leaders.

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Over the past 20 years, Audi’s A4 and A6 and related models have been improved incrementally, but the brand has resisted dropping this oddball layout. The latest version of the longitudinal set-up benefited from a slight improvement in weight distribution but remained a fundamentally dud concept from another age in automotive engineering.