5-door hatch to live on, though.
Come 2019, the new-generation Audi A3 lineup will see a bit of a shakeup, and will take a different form compared to the lineup we’ve come to expect from the compact family of cars. With the 3-door hatch A3 suffering from slow sales, the Ingolstadt brand is expected to drop the body style completely with the new generation, but may gain an alternate third body style in the form of a five-door lift back.
The A3 is offered in our market in 5-door Sportback, 4-door saloon, and 2-door cabriolet body styles, which says a lot about the popularity of the soon-to-be-dead 3-door hatchback variant. There’s little mention of what will happen to the A3 Cabriolet in an Autocar report, suggesting that the A3 may only be reincarnated in 2019 in 5-door Sportback and 4-door saloon body styles.
There’s a little more to it than that, though. The 2019 A3 may see the introduction of a five-door lift back model, which would then gain the Sportback moniker (as per the A5 Sportback) while the hatch would just be left as the ‘A3’ (or possibly the A3 hatch). That would put the new A3 in line with Mercedes-Benz’s confirmed A-Class saloon and shooting brake variants, along with the BMW 1-Series saloon that is reported to hit global markets come 2020. It’s said that the A3 Sportback has serious support within the company, with officials pushing to have it positioned as a more athletic, performance-oriented alternative to the A3 saloon, the same way the A5 Sportback is to the A4.
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