Volkswagen Group of America has recalled 9,048 Audi Q4 E-Tron and Q4 Sportback E-Tron vehicles in the United States because a high-voltage battery failure could lead to a fire, and it has told owners to stop charging above 80 percent until a fix is ready.
The campaign covers certain 2024 and 2025 model year cars and is listed by NHTSA as recall 26V698000. Audi says it is aware of no crashes, fires or injuries involving its own vehicles tied to the defect.
What Audi has told owners
The interim safeguard is a charging limit: owners of affected cars should charge to a maximum of 80 percent until a permanent remedy exists. The concern involves a state of charge above 80 percent in certain conditions, and the risk is linked to thermal propagation, where one overheating cell spreads heat to neighbouring cells.
Interim notification letters are expected to reach registered owners on December 18, 2026, explaining both the charging cap and the recall itself. Audi has not announced when a permanent repair will be ready, and dealers will carry out the recall work free of charge once one is.
The 80 percent cap is the only safeguard Audi has described so far, which puts the burden on owners to change their charging habits before any letter even arrives. For anyone who routinely charges to full overnight, that is a real change to daily use, not a formality.
The investigation is still open
Audi's Product Safety Committee received reports of thermal events in the high-voltage battery on September 21, 2026, and the recall was opened roughly three weeks later. Volkswagen Group of America filed its Noncompliance Information Report with NHTSA on October 21, 2026, and recall documents state that "the exact root cause remains under active investigation".
Owners can already check whether their car is affected: NHTSA added the vehicle identification numbers to its online lookup tool on October 23, 2026. Public NHTSA documents describe the affected population by model year and total volume rather than a detailed production date range.
A wider problem across the group
The Q4 E-Tron campaign sits alongside a similar issue on the Volkswagen ID.4, which affects 22,524 vehicles with the same unresolved root cause and the same instruction to limit charging to 80 percent. VINs for that ID.4 campaign became searchable on NHTSA.gov on October 6, 2026.
The parallel recalls matter because they suggest a shared engineering question rather than an isolated batch fault, though Audi has not said the two are technically linked beyond the common symptom and remedy. Until the root cause is pinned down, neither brand can tell owners how long the charging restriction will last.
What is still unanswered
Audi has not said how many cars might need battery replacement, what the permanent fix will involve, or when it will be available. The recall documents do not give a production date range, so owners outside the listed model years have no way to judge their exposure beyond the VIN lookup.
There is no Australian recall or local owner notification in the material published so far, and no indication of whether the same charging advice applies outside the US. Buyers shopping a used 2024 or 2025 Q4 E-Tron should run the VIN before agreeing a price, since the charging cap affects how the car can be used day to day.
