An Audi S6 e-tron owner says a dealer-installed software update that Audi mailed him as a free campaign left his car unable to charge reliably at home or at public stations, that his dealer has run out of fixes, and that Audi’s customer line told him the problem isn’ t documented.
Barry Schwartz, who bought his 2025 S6 Sportback e-tron a year ago, was among the affected owners.
Schwartz posted the account on X this week with a screenshot of the car’s charging screen: the vehicle plugged in at 75% and 257 miles of range, a red lightning bolt on the charger graphic, and the message “There is a fault in the charging system.”
“Loved my @Audi etron for a year, then I got a recall notice to update the software to KD2*,” he wrote. “After Audi updated the software, I have not been able to consistently charge the car. The service center blames Audi corporate for the software update, Audi corporate blames the service center. I have never gone through the Lemon Law before but here we go. I love the car but the software update bricked my charging and I am not alone.”
Four threads on the r/AudiQ6 forum and a Facebook owners’ group show similar complaints.
Asked on X whether public charging worked, he answered: “Similar issues on super chargers. Not perfect but better.”
Full Details
Schwartz described the sequence to EV on Wednesday. “I got a postcard in the mail from Audi saying I have a free software update recall which fixes and updates a bunch of things,” he said.
He took the car to his local Audi service centre on August 19. “They installed the update the next day and told me I was all set. I tried charging the next night at home and it didn’t work. So I drove it to Electrify America and it took three tries to get it to charge, then it stopped mid-charge and I had to try again.”
Schwartz documented the failures and returned the car. “They told me they pushed another software update that fixed it. I got it back about 3–4 days later and I plugged it into my home charger and it didn’t work. I had to plug it in and out dozens of times and sometimes it will charge.”
The service centre, he said, told him “there is nothing more for them to do. They don’t have any new software updates to push to the car.”
When he called Audi of America on Tuesday, “they told me it is not documented as an issue with them. I should bring it back to the service center.”
He raised the lemon law and was told an Audi representative would contact him. His summary: “The charger is trying to push power to the car but the car will not accept it.”
On Wednesday the dealer emailed him: “Sorry for the late response, but I just checked in with the foreman but we still have not received a response back from Audi. Keeping our eyes open for anything, the foreman is required to check these cases every day for responses or updates.”
What Audi Sent
The postcard was Service Action 06K2, which Audi of America and Audi Canada launched on June 24 as “a proactive quality initiative through a vehicle software update (KD2*)” that “is designed to address customer satisfaction concerns and deliver improvements and enhancements to various vehicle systems,” according to the dealer communication Audi filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
It covers the 2025 A6 Sportback e-tron, S6 Sportback e-tron, Q6 e-tron, Q6 Sportback and SQ6 e-tron, is software only, takes about half a day, and is being released in waves. It is not a safety recall.
KD2* is the second combined update for Audi’s PPE-platform electric cars. The first, KD2, was released to dealers in October 2025 as Technical Service Bulletin 2079690, software 03.10.00/C, in a letter from Jamie Dennis, Audi of America’s Senior Vice President of Product Quality, Technical Service and After Sales, who said it addressed eleven pending service issues and would “greatly improve customer satisfaction.”
Audi told dealers the update would reset most customer settings and required owners’ digital keys to be deleted and re-added.
Owners reported that dealers had been told not to write “KD2” on service tickets, and that Audi paused installations in November after some failed, in one case leaving a Q6 immobilised for 27 days.
The second update, 03.11.00/C, was scheduled by Audi bulletin for the second and third quarters of 2026 across the electric PPE cars and the petrol A5 and Q5.
The Owner Record
On AudiWorld, a Q6 owner wrote in March that scheduled home charging “completely stopped working after KD2 update (which itself was a nightmare),” with the car charging outside its set window and, when it did charge, stopping and starting “every 10 seconds or so,” and a second owner replied that he was “experiencing this right now.”
Audi’s own bulletins for the platform, as catalogued by owners, include one on AC charging locked at about 3.8 kW when a component-protection flag stays active after a flash, another listing AC charging failing while DC charging works, and a third on charge-flap logic.
Those documents concern faults the updates were meant to fix. No Audi bulletin, recall or statement addresses the symptom Schwartz and the forum owners describe after the June campaign: a car that refuses AC power altogether or accepts it only intermittently.
The A6 e-tron and Q6 e-tron use an 800-volt architecture with an onboard AC charger rated at 9.6 kW in the United States.
A car that draws DC power from a fast charger but declines AC power from a home unit points at the onboard charger’s handshake with the charging equipment, which is software.
The Loop
Schwartz’s position is the one lemon-law claims are built on: two repair attempts by the dealer for the same defect, a dealer that says it has no further remedy, and a manufacturer that says the defect does not exist.
New York’s law covers a defect not repaired after four attempts or 30 days out of service within two years or 18,000 miles, and a manufacturer’s inability to offer a repair is what attorneys look for.
“Without Audi corporate admitting to the issue, they won’t fix the software issue and charging won’t work for many owners of these e-trons,” Schwartz said. He believes the problem affects “all EVs running KD2*,” which is his reading of the forums and not a count.
Audi of America has been asked whether it has documented AC charging failures after either update, whether a further update is in preparation, how many vehicles have received KD2*, and how many buyback requests it has received on the Q6 and A6 e-tron.
