This is the E-tron GT, the first plug-in Audi with a range. About time. Endurance wasn’t the forte of the obese SUV that came before it. Grinning, I heard a buyer complain about the range of his E-tron. He did not go further than 280 kilometers. He also liked to hurry, he admitted honestly, but it wasn’t practical and not quite what those guys from Vorsprung durch Technik had promised.
With the GT you can easily get 20 kWh per 100 kilometers even on the highway within the legal speed margins. I could never have done that with the first E-tron. On a beautiful, relatively windless late summer day I even arrive at 17.8 from Amsterdam to Groningen, almost middle-class values. While this is not exactly a middle class. What a bonk of a car, 2350 kilos clean on the hook. Nevertheless, the on-board computer indicates a range of between 440 and 465 kilometers after each charge. On the other hand, I understand why a brand like BMW puts the obsession with range into perspective. Charging infrastructure and charging speed are much more important. You create peace with that.
I also find this with the two nice men I meet after a charging session at the fast charger of Shell Recharge in Groningen, while I notice that the GT has gone from a battery level of 58% to 99 within half an hour; the thing loads like a rocket. The two represent the extremes of the user spectrum. One is already driving his second i-Pace, now fortunately with a three-phase charger, and is still delighted with his great handling crossover. The other, himself a petrolhead in heart and soul, is waiting his turn with his partner’s Hyundai Ioniq.
We start talking. I always make time for such encounters. The charging station is the village pump of the new world. Here a journalist gauges the mood of the users. And these two, stand out, don’t complain. The range is for neither of them the major stumbling block that it was quite recently for too many motorists. Although the Jag-man, who likes to kick it, sees his on-board computer indicate frightening averages of 40 kWh per 100, I don’t hear him whine about the practical consequences. Then load more often, and you can do that anywhere. The petrolhead, himself a Maserati man, shows respect for his loaner Hyundai, which effortlessly exceeds its promised range of 211 kilometers. His personal reserves against electric driving are no obstacle to his confidence in the car. Nothing to worry about. We’re here, and that fat supercharger cable is pumping enough power for a speedy resumption of the journey.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s the point of this conversation; that we no longer associate EVs with limitations and stress. While we supported and complained less and less justified, they have quietly become the new normal. We are there to be enthusiasts among each other like the petrolheads of the past went through their BMWs at the counter. All three of us have outgrown the pioneering phase. We regard plugging as the most normal thing in the world. The psychological tipping point is behind us. I steer that black batmobile across the country as relaxed as any diesel before. The tension that used to be there, regardless of the range, is gone. Only now.
It does not only say something about the qualities of the first plug-in Audi with a range, or about the steadily improving coverage of the charging network. It says something about me and about all of us, about the time it took us to adjust to a new world – even me, with dozens of EVs on my resume. I see a parallel with moving, which I just did. For months you feel like a hotel guest in your own home. Only on the day when you reach for the cheese slicer in the cutlery drawer for the first time without searching, the tent is really yours. First you have to go through an inner barrier of habituation. After that you don’t understand what you’ve worked so hard about.
Unless it starts pouring hellishly at the slow charging station in your neighborhood. But most plug-ins with a GT budget will not know that problem from experience.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl