Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin and this is the brand new Audi e-tron now howdy was awesome F to sponsor our trip out here to San Francisco for the launch event and I've got to say I want one like I really really want one the e-tron brand has been around for a couple years now primarily on the a3 e-tron it's a cool car but it is a plug-in hybrid whereas this is fully electric something I really appreciate about the e-tron is that it actually doesn't look ugly that might sound like a backhanded compliment but a lot of electric cars straight-up do look like science projects this looks like a classic outie with a little bit of an electric Flair one of the easiest ways to spot that this is an e-tron and not a standard outie is going to be with the grille it looks similar but the main difference here is that it actually isn't a full grille so in fact this is the only area that will actually open it up and that's purely based on how you need to cool the battery or stuff like the air-conditioning when you're on the freeway it can all close up this is one to be fully aerodynamic take a look inside the e-tron what you're going to find is something that is very much classic aldi but with a lot of nice tech touches so you get all kinds of information up on here for example you can get a giant high-resolution Google map or you can get some more the performance data it's more the economy stuff as of course you're driving an electric vehicle you want to be able to see how efficiently you're driving there's a bunch of different things that you can do with virtual cockpit but that my friends is just the beginning you also have two additional screens here in the center console so this is going to be the main display it works for things like your navigation and it does have this nice little haptic touch feature which is share with nalli this display but also the one on the back seat this is where you're going to do primarily most of the stuff in the vehicle you can pull up like car play your settings whatever you want to do and below that is where you can control all of the different climate control stuff and a couple of other settings so if I want I can say just turn up the fan you can set the dual zone climate control or you can do a couple of other things like say open your garage door or turn off the screens altogether unfortunately we're actually connected to the internet right now but if we were I could show you that Alexa is built into the e-tron this is a new partnership with Amazon it's the full version of Alexa which is using LTE to be able to ask it well pretty much anything you want so in theory you can say on your way home hey Alexa start my garage door open something really cool that's sadly not coming to the US is the virtual mirror now right now it's going to be too loose into Europe mostly because of the regulations here but essentially it replaces the standard mirrors with cameras what this means is that not going to help with aerodynamics but this little section right here is going to be replaced with an OLED display which will then show you what's going to be going on behind you on top of that it will even adjust the view based on how quickly you're driving so you might see a little bit of a wider view on the freeway or a little bit of a tighter view when you're on a side street or whatever the case is but it's going to be fully adjustable and it's a freaking camera on a screen and your side mirror thing I want it the start of the show here is definitely the electric powertrain now you guys you can kind of see this from the outside so underneath the floor of the cabin is going to be the full 95 watt hour cell there is a lot of engineering that goes into that battery cell so on top of being about the largest capacity that you can get on any electric vehicle right now there's going to be a lot of safety and importantly a lot of cooling inside the entire bottom of the battery is all going to be liquid cooled and on top of that this crash structure around it is hugely important because you know if someone hits your car you don't want your batteries to be impacted so now these are going to be an actual crash structure on the side of the cell but each individual battery cell they're going to be 36 of them that take up the actual battery space they're all going to be individually protected with a very strong steel frame there's not a final us range number available for the e-tron yet since it won't be going on sale until next year but based on the European cycle you should expect 200 plus miles on a charge and that combined with the ultra fast charging should mean that well I don't care it's fine it's plenty for me the e-tron will charge it up to 150 kilowatts now as far as I know that's about the quickest electric vehicle charge that you can find at a full 150 kilowatt hour charge what you can do is you can get this thing from 0% to 80% in 30 minutes the e-tron is powered by a pair of electric motors one on the rear axle one on the front now in addition to giving you the full outtie quattro experience of all-wheel drive you're going to be getting some pretty decent power so the finalized figures aren't in just yet here in the US but you should expect somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 to 400 horsepower and importantly since it is an electric vehicle you're going to have a lot of torque and is going to be instant there's also a boost mode on board so if you want just a little bit of extra power say you're trying to outrun marques or something not that I would ever do that in an e-tron then there's actually going to be a little bit of extra power for a few seconds which you can engage either by putting the car in sport mode or if you really flip floor the throttle there's actually a button on the back side of the pedal which will then give you just a little bit of extra juice for a few seconds even though it's an electric vehicle you're not giving up a lot of practicality so this has standard air suspension which you can see is currently lowering all the way down you have a couple inches of play whether you want to go off row or you want to go into dynamic mode which is just a fine mode you should drive it in fun mode and if you really want to go crazy with it this can actually tow up to 4,000 pounds if you get the tow package which I just kind of want to try because you know an electric car that's fast and roomy and can tow I'm just really trying to sell my fiance on this right now so just between us she's just roll with it okay what really impresses me with the e-tron is that it feels like it is the full package sure you're getting an electric vehicle but it's also a luxurious outing with all the bells and whistles and importantly all the functionality that you would expect I was kind of surprised to say this but I'm glad that Audi really sponsored a trip out here because I legitimately want an e-tron