Twenty-five thousand a year is a lot of trucks for a brand that has not yet sold one. That is the number an unnamed US official reportedly tied to Audi and South Carolina, and it has fueled fresh talk that the German luxury marque could build a rugged, body-on-frame SUV on the Scout platform. None of it has been confirmed, and the details below come from secondhand reporting.
What the Official Reportedly Said
According to Motor1, which credits an earlier CNBC report, the unnamed official linked roughly 25,000 vehicles a year, built at Scout Motors' plant in Blythewood, South Carolina, to Audi. The comment reportedly surfaced around President Trump's announcement of a separate $4 billion Audi assembly plant in Georgia. Some of that output could reportedly be exported.
The official has not been named, and Audi has not confirmed the figure or the plan. Scout said on October 24 that it had nothing to announce. Treat the number as a claim, not a production schedule.
Why the Scout Plant Fits
Volkswagen Group, Audi's parent, is reportedly investing $2 billion in the Blythewood facility to revive Scout as a body-on-frame off-road brand. Scout has shown two concepts, the Traveler SUV and the Terra pickup, both with fully electric drive. The company also plans electric and gas-powered Harvester range-extender versions, in which a gas engine acts as a generator for the electric motors rather than driving the wheels directly.
Motor1 suggests that an Audi built here would more likely ride on Scout's body-on-frame underpinnings than on a reworked unibody SUV. That would be a notable shift for a brand best known for road-focused crossovers and wagons.
A Plan That Predates the Number
The idea is not new. Late-2025 reports, relayed by outlets including Carscoops and AutoGuide and traced to Germany's Automobilwoche, described an Audi range-extender SUV for the US market, built at the same South Carolina plant on a ladder-frame chassis with serious four-wheel-drive hardware, and aimed at the Land Rover Defender. We covered that earlier report in Audi's New Off-Roader Challenges Defender. The target at the time was production beginning by late 2027.
A February 2026 report citing Der Spiegel suggested Scout's own launch could slip to around mid-2028, with the Audi model, reportedly codenamed "Rugged," delayed alongside it. Audi has not detailed the vehicle or given it a name.
What Audi's CEO Has Said About Rugged Cars
Audi CEO Gernot Döllner has floated extending the lineup "in both directions," including rugged SUVs and sports cars. He has named the Mercedes-Benz G-Class and Land Rover Defender as benchmarks, and said such models "do not sell in huge numbers, but they do generate very large amounts of revenue."
That framing matters when reading the 25,000 figure. Vehicles in that class are typically low-volume, high-margin products, so a number that size would be a big commitment, whether it covers one Audi model, several, or Scout's own vehicles. The reporting does not say which.
What Remains Unknown
Nobody at Audi has confirmed that South Carolina would build this vehicle, what it would be called, how it would be powered, or when it would arrive. Motor1 also notes that Audi previously showed an off-road concept based on the Q6 e-tron but never tied it to a factory or a production number. Until Audi or Volkswagen says more, a Scout-based Audi off-roader is best read as a credible but unconfirmed possibility.
