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Audi e-tron review

And because they are located lower than a mirror would be, you lose peripheral vision of the road ahead while you are trying to figure out what exactly it is you’re looking at. Many other countries get their e-trons with regular mirrors, due to the electronic ones not being allowed under existing regulations, and I do think I’d prefer the old fashioned solution myself. That’s not to say that there are no advantages to the high-tech solution that we are getting in Russia. There is less aerodynamic drag when you remove the rather large frontal surface of a regular mirror, which means higher efficiency, and these screens look pretty damn cool in the interior. Passengers will be impressed. But they certainly take some time to get used to, and I found myself basically trusting the car to tell me when it was safe to switch lanes. A green stripe is shown when the computers think there is no car alongside you, so rather than trying to decipher the weirdly angled view from the cameras I simply trusted the car. And it seemed to work well, because I handed the e-tron back to Audi without a scratch a couple days later.

The electric powertrain, meanwhile, does exactly what you’d expect of it. It is fairly powerful, but it is the immediacy of the power delivery that still takes you back. This is a trait inherent to electric motors, and probably the best thing about them other than the silence with which they do their jobs. For many years we’ve talked about how naturally aspirated combustion engines are much more responsive than turbocharged ones, but an electric motor is in an entirely different category altogether. And because there is no gearbox, there is never any perceptible delay between your right foot demanding acceleration and the car delivering it. It’s actually hard not to start driving like a lunatic and jumping into every little gap you see on the road, because the car makes it so easy to do things that you simply couldn’t before.

Of course by now we’re also well aware of the flip side of electric cars, and that is their driving range. And the anxiety that you may experience when you realize that you can’t just pull into a petrol station and fill up the tank when you run out of juice. The reality is that as of yet there isn’t a battery technology available that can put enough energy into a small enough space whilst not weighing too much for an electric car to be able to go as far as a petrol or diesel powered one. So if you intend to go for a long drive, a bit more planning will need to go into it, and the trip will take a bit longer. Doesn’t matter which EV you’re driving. But it’s also true the vast majority of the time, if not always, you just don’t drive that far. And rather than visit petrol stations, you can just plug in your car at home or at work. And to make that as convenient as possible, the e-tron has charge ports on both sides. So you can park it however you want, there’s always a charge port on the “correct” side.

I had actually expected the indicated range on the dashboard to start plummeting as soon as I started driving it, but that turned out not to be the case. The car showed 327 kilometers of range at the press park, and when I got home it had pretty much dropped by the same distance as I had actually traveled. This was in the usual heavy Moscow traffic, with the radio and air conditioning on. I quickly found out that the e-tron seems incredibly efficient driving around the center of Moscow. Which is mostly standing still or driving very slowly. You’re not wasting much energy because at low speeds there isn’t much aerodynamic drag pushing against the car, and when you brake to slow down much of the energy is recovered and stored in the battery. You could drive around the city for a very, very long time in this.

It’s a slightly different story when you go onto a highway. At higher speeds, efficient though the car’s aerodynamics are, the reality is that you’re depleting the battery by pushing the car through the invisible wall of air at higher speeds. It’s not too bad at 110 km/h, but at 130 or so you’re starting to lose range pretty quickly. This, by the way, is also a feature of all EVs. Even those made by Tesla aren’t really much ahead of the competition when it comes to range at higher speeds. Still, you’re looking at about 250 kilometers of highway range depending on the weather and other things which is quite a long way to drive. You’re probably due a coffee break at that point anyway, a good opportunity to plug in the car and top up the battery. The charging network inside Russia still has a long way to go before it could be described as sufficient, but certainly you won’t have any issues finding a charging point near Moscow and on the larger highways.

At the end of the day, what I found most remarkable about the e-tron was how normal it felt, and also that it felt like a completely finished product. You couldn’t really tell that this is the first electric model they’ve ever built. They didn’t make life unnecessarily complicated by stripping the interior of everything bar a touchscreen either. The e-tron is a high end Audi SUV which just happens to be powered by electrons. Which is to say, it’s about as good as an electric vehicle as you can get right now.