What Audi Is Going For With The E-tron

Audi wants to make electric cars standard fare and its vanguard on that front is the e-tron.

- Daryl Lee

So, it’s taken a while to get here – blame a combination of limited allocation for right-hand-drive markets like ours (this is conjecture, I admit), local homologation and of course, the pandemic slowing things down.

In the meantime, Audi has introduced two e-trons, the Sportback and the GT, to its line-up. The former is a rakish SUV like the Q8 and the latter is a four-door coupe in the vein of the A7 Sportback.

At any rate, what we have now, finally, is the original e-tron (well, not really the original, since the first car to wear that badge was an electrified R8 sports car), which is a full-sized SUV that could be best thought of as an electric Q7.

It even looks like the Q7, but with a blanked-out grille for better aerodynamics, a lack of tailpipes, safety-orange accents scattered throughout the car, and of course, an electric drivetrain.

Said electric drivetrain is a 360hp (408hp in short bursts) unit that drives all four wheels, with the 95kWh battery pack providing 400km of claimed range. Suffice it to say, you’ll never be able to achieve that, unless you drive it at a snail’s pace with the windows up and with the airconditioning, along with other power-hungry ancillaries, turned off.

Still, a real-world range of around 300km is entirely possible, and Audi says getting the e-tron’s batteries from flat to around 80 per cent can be done in about half an hour. There is a big caveat to that, however.