Range Finder: The Audi Q4 Sportback E-Tron and an 1100km road trip

The calculations started the moment I pulled away from the Hilton Munich Airport Hotel in the Audi Q4 Sportback e-Tron.

My destination was Stuttgart, 264km to the west along the A8 autobahn, where tomorrow I’d be going for a ride in a Mercedes-EQ EQE prototype. But along the way I wanted to give Audi's latest EV a run along some quiet roads to see how it compared with the Volkswagen ID.3 and ID.4 models with which it shares its platform and electric powertrain.

I quickly ruled out heading north to Nuremberg and then cutting southwest back through the rolling Baden-Wüttemberg hills to Stuttgart. That was a 475km route, and the Audi’s dash showed that with a 98 per cent charge in the battery its predicted range was 304km.

But if I headed to Donauworth, hooked left to Nördlingen and then on to Stuttgart, I could still sample some fun roads. Total distance, 305km. That might work.

The process took me back more than 30 years, to when calculating range and distance was a normal part of any longish drive outside Australia’s capital cities.

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I’d learned from bitter experience hustling my Datsun 1600 through the back blocks of Victoria en route from Adelaide to the Alpine Rally one year that finding a servo open in a country town at 2 am wasn’t a given.

Then there was the night I coasted a VW Kombi down the Great Alpine Road, engine off, the old girl leaning in the corners like a Sydney-Hobart yacht on a spinnaker run, to arrive in Bright with little more than fumes in the tank. I’d also willed a Jaguar XJ that had been running on empty for 60km through the Mallee sunset to make it to Tailem Bend.

Range anxiety. It was a thing in Australia long before electric vehicles.

It’s the only time in my life I’d not driven as fast as conditions would allow on an unrestricted autobahn – the calculations continued. Range and distance. Range and distance

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Stuttgart wasn’t my final destination in the Audi Q4 Sportback e-Tron. The day after my Mercedes EQE ride, I would be heading a further 228km west, to Hambach in France, to see the factory where the new Ineos Grenadier was being built.

The day after that, I had a 100km round trip to and from the abandoned coal mine where I was scheduled to take a prototype Grenadier for an off-road test drive. And finally, there was the 460km run back to Munich to get my plane to London. All up, more than 1000km.

Audi’s e-Tron Charging Service Card was tucked into the sun visor of the Q4 Sportback. Plug in at a charger, tap the card, and you’re good to go, the Audi people said.

But as I merged onto the A8, dialled up 130km/h on the cruise control and headed for Augsburg – the only time in my life I’ve never driven as fast as traffic and conditions would allow on an unrestricted autobahn – the calculations continued. Range and distance. Range and distance.

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This wasn’t my first long trip in an EV. Back in 2018, I drove the then-new Jaguar i-Pace almost 1100km from London to Berlin. Now that had been an adventure. Chargers were few and far between, and most were slow old 22kW units that, even if they worked, didn’t always allow you to pay by credit card nor handshake with the Jaguar’s onboard charging software.

It had taken five hours to complete the first charge of the trip, a saga that had started with a string of busted or malfunctioning chargers at Jabbeke near the pancake-flat Belgian coast and finished at an Audi dealer in Ghent who’d just had a 50kW charger installed for the Audi e-Trons. The Jaguar had arrived with just 14km range remaining after I’d feather-footed it for 55km from Jabbeke.

In 1949, Jabbeke had been the making of the Jaguar XK120 when a prototype had achieved just over 213km/h on a closed section of the autoroute near the town. Almost 70 years later, Jabbeke had nearly broken the Jaguar i-Pace.

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A lot has changed since then. Germany has EV chargers all over the country. What I didn’t know was how many would be easily accessible or available, or how accurately the Audi monitored its consumption rate and battery charge levels. And could I trust the navigation system to get me to a charger when the car needed a top-up? Range and distance.

I quickly learned the Q4 Sportback e-Tron's nav system not only tells you where you are and where you’re going but will also plan your journeys to take the most efficient route, considering everything from road gradients to traffic density to ambient temperatures to the location and speed of chargers. Combined with active driver aids such as adaptive cruise control and lane-keep assist, the Q4 – like many modern cars – takes a lot of the brainwork out of a long-distance drive.

Providing, that is, you’re happy to go the way the car wants to go, in the manner the car wants to get there.

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When deciding to take an interesting shortcut, working off the sat-nav map rather than using a route guidance system programmed to find the road of least resistance, I found I had to manage the Q4 Sportback just like in the old days, mentally calculating battery charge and range, using the nav system to scout the locations of chargers, and working out likely points of no return that would commit me to one route or the other.

It wasn’t just the shape of the roads I had to think about, either. It was the gradients, too. And the longer I drove the Q4 Sportback, the more I understood how the environment affected its range, with ambient temperatures and wind direction all having a noticeable impact.

Left to its own devices, the Audi does a lot of the thinking for the driver, anticipating speed restrictions, automatically increasing regen to improve efficiency

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The Audi Q4 Sportback e-Tron is one of Audi’s entry-level EVs. Like the cheaper Q4 e-Tron (the Sportback has, as its name implies, a more steeply raked D-pillar than the regular, hatch-profile Q4 e-Tron) it rolls on VW Group’s high volume, low-cost MEB electric vehicle platform.

My top-spec Prestige model boasted dual motors that produced a total of 220kW and 460Nm, powered by an 82kWh battery with a usable 76.6kWh of energy storage that gave a WLTP range of between 412km and 488km.

It was a shock to spot drum brakes lurking behind the alloy rear wheels, a visual reminder of the Q4 Sportback’s plebian underpinnings, despite the top-end MMI navigation and virtual cockpit systems, LED matrix headlights, Sonos audio system and augmented reality head-up display that are part and parcel of the Prestige trim package.

The good news is that unlike Volkswagen, the ID interiors of which look unforgivably cheap, Audi can make modest plastics look upscale. The grained stuff looks almost like leather, and shiny stuff on the dash looks like metal. Even the piano black looks like it belongs on a piano.

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Left to its own devices in the default Auto drive mode, the Audi does a lot of the thinking for the driver, anticipating speed restrictions and junctions, automatically increasing the level of regen as you approach them while prompting you to lift off the throttle to reduce speed and improve efficiency. All while making sure you stay in the right lane.

I like to do my own thinking behind the wheel, however, so every time I climbed behind the wheel, I disabled the lane-keeping assistance to stop red and green lines floating into my field of vision in the head-up display. More importantly, though, this also killed the aggressive reactions through the steering wheel that made the Audi feel truculent if I took a line it didn’t like.

The Q4 Sportback e-Tron has three levels of lift-off regenerative braking – low, medium, and high – as well as a coast mode. All are controlled by the paddles on the steering wheel, though, confusingly, the plus paddle means less regen, while the minus paddle gives you more. To make the Audi’s progress down the road feel more fluid, I mostly left it in coast mode, or the lowest level of regen.

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Through the hills, I also quickly learned that the best drive mode is Dynamic. This didn’t just make the Audi feel sharper and more responsive. It put me even more in charge, reducing the interventions from the electronic nannies. What it also revealed, however, is that despite its relatively stiff suspension the Q4 Sportback e-Tron isn’t hugely … dynamic.

There’s plenty of grip and decent thrust, but little adjustability in the chassis. The Audi feels lazy on turn-in and understeers when you go to power. Slow in, fast out; fast in, slow out – it doesn’t matter what you try, the Q4 Sportback e-Tron remains stubbornly one-dimensional in its responses. There’s not a ton of feedback through the steering, and it doesn’t punch out of corners from the rear axle like some other dual-motor EVs I’ve driven.

Like every MEB-platform car I’ve sampled so far, the Q4 Sportback e-Tron is competent but disappointingly dull.

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I’m sure Schloss Flochberg was a fascinating place back in the 12th century, but today it’s just a handful of ruined walls atop a wind-blown hill. I’m here because, with the battery charge down to 32 per cent after 170km of mainly autobahn and main-road running, the Audi’s going to need more energy to get through the hills to Stuttgart.

The nav system had immediately directed me to the nearest 150kW charger when asked. It didn’t tell me that the charger was located just outside the gate of a factory in a drab village that seemed devoid of life and, most critically, any sign of a coffee shop. I walked up to the ruined Schloss because, well, there wasn’t much else to do. It took precisely 48.23 minutes for the Q4 Sportback to suck down 45.39kWh, boosting the indicated range to 268km.

Audi’s sat-nav system would prove unerringly accurate over the next few days, showing not only the location of chargers on the map, but also whether they were high-speed chargers – 150kW or better – and with a couple of taps on the menu, whether they were free or not. That allowed me to factor another element into my range and distance calculations – time.

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A peculiar characteristic of charging an EV’s battery is that the rate at which it will accept a charge slows, especially once the state of charge exceeds 80 per cent. That, and the fact that batteries aren’t happy being always recharged to 100 per cent, is the reason most EV experts suggest recharging from 10 per cent to 80 per cent is the most efficient, both in terms of time spent at a standstill and long-term battery health.

I found the Audi’s 400V system meant waiting about 50 minutes for a 150kW charger to get the battery from 30 per cent charge to 90 per cent charge, or 40 per cent charge to 100 per cent charge. I proved the worth of a quick ‘park and spark’ strategy – and the potential of 350kW chargers – when I plugged the Audi into one near Stuttgart and the battery’s state of charge zoomed from 11 per cent to 48 per cent in just 15 minutes, adding 115km of range.

The equivalent of a long-range fuel tank on an EV is a big-ass battery. Unfortunately, current EV battery technology is such that big means heavy

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The equivalent of a long-range fuel tank on an EV is a big-ass battery.

Unfortunately, current EV battery technology is such that big means heavy: The 212.7kWh battery in the giant GMC Hummer EV Pickup recently launched in the US weighs as much as a Honda Civic.

What’s more useful is a fast charge rate. If the Audi had an 800V architecture like Hyundai’s Ioniq 5 and Kia’s EV6 – or Audi's own e-Tron GT for that matter – my time spent at 300kW or 350kW chargers would have effectively been halved.

Efficiency? Over six days I put 250.7kW into the Q4 Sportback before finishing back at Munich Airport with an indicated 26 per cent of battery charge remaining. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested the Q4 Sportback e-Tron therefore used a total of 307.4kW to cover 1140km, which translated to consumption of 27kWh/100km.

That’s worse than the 17.9kWh/100km to 21.3kWh/100km Audi claims under WLTP, but to be fair I didn’t treat Q4 Sportback with kid gloves, upping my cruising speed on the autobahn to 140km/h-145km/h, with a couple of bursts to verify the claimed 180km/h top speed, and hustling the car along winding country roads in Germany and France. It was cold, too, the mercury hovering around five degrees C, with blustery headwinds on much of the journey west.

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And the single most important thing I learned after 1140km in an electric vehicle? Infrastructure is everything. Germany has in just a few years built a charging infrastructure that makes it possible to drive an EV the length and breadth of the country.

Yes, Germany has 70 times the population density of Australia. But Australia has fewer major population centres, and fewer roads connecting them. In the context of previous Australian national infrastructure projects, it wouldn’t take much effort or investment to install a network of 350kW chargers at key intervals along the major highways connecting all our capital cities.

Long-distance journeys in EVs would then be viable and practical.

Just make sure there’s a decent coffee shop at each of them.