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Audi says the one-size-fits-all global car is no longer the way forward.

Its SAIC China brand now builds models tailored only for local buyers.

This approach also lets the company bring new models to market faster.

Audi has decided the global car is a dead idea. Building a single vehicle engineered to satisfy every market at once no longer adds up, and the company now argues the sharper play is designing separate models for its biggest markets, each shaped around what those buyers actually want.

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Rouven Mohr, Audi’s chief technical officer, says no one model can win over shoppers in North America, Europe , and China all at once, which explains why the brand stood up the new AUDI marque in China with SAIC to build cars made specifically for that market. Tastes have simply drifted too far apart for a one-size answer to hold.

Read: Audi’s China Brand Is Cutting Prices And Losing Sales, So It’s Building A Sporty Limo

“I think the idea of the global car – so one car that fits the world – this is gone, to be honest, because it’s not fitting anymore in the US (and) in China,” Mohr told Go Auto . “You need this kind of local-for-local pillar.”

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In China , the AUDI brand helps meet the needs of many local consumers who want tech-focused cars akin to smartphones on wheels, while offering the most advanced self-driving systems. By comparison, buyers in Europe appreciate less emphasis on screens and like tactile controls, buttons, and switches. Despite this, Audi continues to roll out its curved digital dashboards across an increasing number of its European models .

Slashing Development Times

AUDI E5 Sportback

No longer focusing on global cars is also allowing Audi to speed up the development of its cars . The automaker says it’s now developing vehicles at “China speed” by establishing “project houses” where development teams have direct access to the board, making approvals much quicker.

This approach has already helped Audi launch the limited-run Nuvolari supercar, created as a spiritual successor to the Audi R8 and launching with the same basic twin-turbo V8 hybrid powertrain as the Lamborghini Temerario. Soon, the company’s fast new development cycles will allow it to launch a production version of the Concept C sports car, which will replace the Audi TT.

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Audi Nuvolari

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Two brothers from the wealthy and powerful Medici family died of malaria and were not poisoned as a rumor had suggested, archaeologists have confirmed based on a DNA analysis of the brothers' skeletons. The analysis also revealed a unique, mutated strain of malaria that may hold the key to understanding the evolution of the disease in Europe.

The Medici family rose to power in the 15th century by creating the largest bank in Europe. The family used their extraordinary wealth to fund Renaissance artists and to start a political dynasty that eventually included numerous dukes, four popes and two queens of France.

In the 16th century, Cosimo I took over all of Tuscany as grand duke. But within a span of 25 years, at least five of his family members died from high fevers. This gave rise to a rumor that some of them had been poisoned with arsenic by another family member, although most people believed they died of malaria.

To get to the bottom of the 500-year-old Medici cold case, an international group of researchers tested the bones of two of Cosimo I's sons: Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici and Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici, for the DNA of Plasmodium falciparum , the parasite that causes the deadliest form of malaria and that is transmitted by mosquitoes.

The researchers extracted ancient DNA from the bones of Cardinal Giovanni, who died in 1562 at age 19 in the same month as his mother and younger brother Garzia, and from Grand Duke Francesco I, who died at age 46 in 1587 along with his wife. The team's study was published online June 17 in the journal iScience .

Because of the almost simultaneous deaths of Grand Duke Francesco I and his wife, a rumor circulated that another brother had poisoned them over a long-standing feud. But the Medicis were known to have frequented their family villas in marshy and swampy areas of Tuscany, where malaria was prevalent well into the 20th century.

Researchers found evidence of P. falciparum in the bones of both Medici brothers, confirming reports from court physicians at the time that described the brothers as sick with "tertian fever," a type of high fever that returns every three days and is a hallmark of malaria. The medical reports also revealed the brothers were treated with bloodletting.

The name plate from the tomb of Grand Duke Francesco de' Medici, who died of malaria in 1587. (Image credit: Courtesy the University of Pisa) "Now we can say with scientific certainty that malaria, not poisoning, killed Grand Duke Francesco de Medici," study co-author Valentina Giuffra , a medical historian at the University of Pisa, said in a statement .

But the ancient-DNA study held two additional surprises.

The Grand Duke's bones were positive not only for P. falciparum but also for Plasmodium malariae , a different parasite species that also causes malaria in humans, suggesting that both species contributed to the severe illness that killed him and his wife.

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Cardinal Giovanni, on the other hand, had only P. falciparum , but the specific strain that infected him was previously unknown. The strain is similar to those found in ancient and early modern Europe, but with two mutations the researchers had never seen before, they wrote in the study.

"The study of ancient DNA offers us an opportunity not only to diagnose malaria in the remains of individuals from the past, but it also offers us a window for understanding the evolution of malaria species, Plasmodium falciparum in this case, which can help scientists better understand how the pathogen adapts over time," study first author Alexander Ochoa , an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, said in the statement.

Further analysis of the brothers' bones is needed to determine the evolutionary relationship between the strains of malaria they carried, the researchers wrote in the study.

What do you know about the bones in your body? Test your knowledge with our human skeleton quiz .