The Audi A6 Avant E-Tron is the first of the company’s cars to support Car Key – and a shared platform means we can also be confident it’s coming soon to some Porsche EVs.
Audi hasn’t yet formally announced Car Key support for its latest station wagon, but it was discovered in the Audi app during a review of the car …
What is Car Key?
Car Key is a way to add a virtual copy of your car key to the Wallet app on iPhone and Apple Watch.
Depending on implementation, it can either be used to manually lock and unlock the car, or be used passively – where just walking away from your car will lock it, and approaching it will unlock it.
Car Key also offers the ability to create shared keys for use by selected contacts, where you can grant someone temporary use of your car.
Audi A6 Avant E-Tron gets Car Key support
French site Mac4Ever discovered that support had been quietly added to the app for the new model.
On the A6, the mobile application has not evolved much since the Q6, but offers a major novelty: Apple Car Key, the key on smartphone! Apparently, the feature was deployed very recently, because we discovered it with the Audi teams, which has not yet officially communicated about this availability […]
It works in Bluetooth and a priori in UWB, there is no need to place the phone in the RFID reader in any case: you can leave the phone in your pocket.
The site wasn’t very impressed with the Audi app otherwise, noting that it was either slow to update with status changes, or failed to do so at all.
The app is not always very responsive or really reliable. When the program is opened, the status of the car is often not updated in real time, and it is already necessary to force the refresh. We also can’t see if the A6 is closed, if the windows are well raised or if the air conditioning is on.
But at least Car Key means you can now lock and unlock the car with your iPhone or Apple Watch.
Porsche EV support next
Mac4Ever notes that the E-Tron is built on a platform shared with Porsche. Porsche sees this as, uh, key to its plans to electrify existing models.
The new Premium Platform Electric (PPE), developed in tandem by Audi and Porsche, adds to the electric vehicle platform concept’s scope of application. For Porsche, this creates new opportunities to launch high-volume models with high technical standards at profit, thus taking the electrification of its portfolio another step further.
The Stuttgart sports car manufacturer intends for more than 80 percent of its new deliveries to be fully electric by 2030. The PPE makes it possible to capitalize on the benefits of an all-electric platform in a variety of ways. One example, beyond package and space, is integrating the lithium-ion battery into the underbody. In fleshing out the design amid the conflicting requirements of range, performance and sustainability, Porsche remained true to its philosophy by focusing on travel time. At the same time, the architecture offers lots of leeway when it comes to the wheelbase, track width, and ground clearance, allowing for a variety of performance levels for models with either rear- or all-wheel drive in different segments.
Given the common platform, this means we can expect upcoming Porsche EVs to also support Car Key.
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