Audi Q4 E-tron
Ingolstadt enters volume-selling family EV market with an unconventional crossover
PHOTOGRAPHY OLGUN KORDAL
MODEL TESTED 40 SPORT
Price £44,990 ● Power 201bhp ●Torque 229lb ft ● 0-60mph 8.1sec ● 30-70mph in fourth na ● Fuel economy 2.9mpkWh ● CO 2 emissions 0g/km ● 70-0mph 55.5m
We like
• Spacious, well-packaged cabin easily fits adults in both rows
• Aerodynamic design and good-sized drive battery combine to provide a decent usable range
We don’t like
• Odd design proportions make it an awkward, unlikely-looking Audi SUV
• Cabin has plenty of technology, but not the excellent build quality we expect of Ingolstadt
Watching as the cars we all know, and the companies behind them, switch from reciprocating pistons to electric motors over the coming years will probably feel strange and unsettling at times. As the market’s landscape is made anew, very few of those familiar, bankable automotive-market truths that we’ve always taken for granted are likely to remain fixed. This week, another one bites the dust as Audi branches out into the business end of the market for electric cars for the very first time.
The Q4 E-tron – Ingolstadt’s third all-electric model following the larger E-tron SUV of 2018 and the E-tron GT four-door sports car that was introduced in the UK earlier this year – becomes Audi’s first-ever volume-selling, rear-wheel-drive car. The firm, whose association with front-wheel drive extends back to the 1930s and which famously branched out to develop quattro fourwheel drive in the 1980s, has only ever made rear-driven derivatives of the R8 supercar before. Its refusal to follow the classic mechanical type of its luxury-level rivals with its regular passenger cars has, at times over the decades, bordered on pig-headedness. Now, with so much that’s new and unfamiliar about its first affordable EV, perhaps Audi is hoping that we won’t notice as one of the technical principals that it has always clung to falls by the wayside – or perhaps that we won’t care.
This is, after all, Ingolstadt’s new electric era. The firm will launch its last combustion-engined car within four years, and by 2032 will have built its very last. From here on out, we should expect most of its model introductions to be EVs – and this week’s road test subject provides our first taste of what they might be like.
DESIGN AND ENGINEERING
★★★☆☆
The Q4 E-tron is an all-electric midsized crossover SUV that majors on interior space, on-board technology and, of course, typically refined, responsive zero-emissions running. Dynamic performance and handling and design appeal are important strengths for the car too, says Audi – although, as we’ll see, those claims are a little more open to question.
The car has sprung from the Volkswagen’s Group’s strategically vital MEB electric car platform, and will be built not in an Audi factory but instead alongside the closely related VW ID 4 in Zwickau, Germany. It splits the difference between Audi’s Q3 and Q5 SUVs almost perfectly on height and length. Being an EV with a heavy under-floor drive battery stretching almost the full width and length available within the wheelbase, the Q4 weighs more than either a conventionally powered Q3 or Q5, though: 2050kg in running order in the case of our test car, and up to 2135kg for a range-topping version.
The car comes in three mechanical derivatives, two of which have a single permanently excited synchronous motor cradled above their rear wheels that drives those rear wheels exclusively. In the entrylevel Q4 E-tron 35, that motor makes 168bhp and draws power from a drive battery with usable capacity of 52kWh. In the mid-range 40 (as tested), it makes 201bhp (but the same 229lb ft) and has 77kWh of usable electricity storage to draw on.