Luxury EVs can do it too

ELECTRIC vehicles or EVs are now measured by the range they can travel. Now popularly called “range anxiety,” it is one of the biggest concerns any car buyer deals with when considering a purchase of an EV.

The last model I tested, the Kia EV5 (I have not been doing test drives for quite a bit because of too many desk duties), did not elicit this range anxiety from me because I just had to drive it for a day. Kia’s media program then was very restricted, allowing us only a definite route and destination.

But generally, car companies with EV models tend to be less adventurous with their test drives to avoid any inconvenience. This despite claims that their electric cars can travel more than 300 or 500 kilometers (kms) factoryrated distance.

However, during the last event at PGA Cars, the local seller of premium cars like Audi, Porsche and Maserati (to name a few), I found out that they were able to drive the Audi Q8 e-tron up to Baguio and back to Manila on a single charge.

Now, this is a bit surprising to me because premium brands tend to be very conservative when doing these kinds of performance tests, lest they make a mistake and mess up the unit. I mean, that would be a multi-million-peso mistake nobody wants to make if they can avoid it.

The Audi Q8 e-tron is a 100-percent electric vehicle, which means it does not have any other power plant running it except for that electric motor powered by a very high-tech battery pack.

“This feat shatters misconceptions about EVs, addressing ‘range anxiety’ among users while also reinforcing the Q8 e-tron models’ ample capacity to be driven daily under realworld conditions — with zero emissions, at that,” said Audi Philippines Managing Director Gian Paolo Brambilla.

Now, we must remember that the Audi Q8 e-tron is a luxury car that needs to burn more juice than any ordinary internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle.

ICE vehicles have the luxury of an alternator unit that turns the power output of a petrol engine into electrical charge. This allows cars to use as much electricity-powered gadgets as it want without fear of running out of juice.

Electric vehicles do not have that feature unless the battery capacity can carry the load.

Carrying four people, the Q8 e-tron started the drive from the Audi Greenhills dealership in EDSA, Mandaluyong, with a fully charged battery. The drive mode was set in “Efficiency,” and had the air-conditioning on. It only used some 15 percent of its electric charge until SCTEx and still had 382 kms of distance left to travel. Reaching Baguio was now so much easier since there were only some 160 kms left to travel.

Now, while people will say that the range left for the Audi Q8 e-tron at this point is not enough to return home to Manila, we should remember that the Q8 e-tron relies more on recuperation than on its disc brakes so the vehicle actually added energy to its battery upon reaching the flatlands.

The Q8 e-tron is equipped with two electric motors and reinterprets Audi’s legendary Quattro all-wheel drive system. Output is rated at 408 hp and torque at 664 Nm, letting the vehicle accelerate from a standstill to 100 kph in 5.6 seconds, and on to a top speed of 200 kph according to its spec sheet.

This allowed the Q8 to pass its most difficult test, climbing Marcos Highway, a route that heavily exhausts battery charge. Still, by the time it reached Camp John Hay, the Q8 e-tron had 40-percent charge left. This was after traveling a distance of 263 kms.

On the way back, as I was saying earlier, the Q8 e-tron’s recuperation function came into play during the descent from Baguio City. The system harnessed kinetic energy as it helped decelerate the vehicle going downhill, turning this energy into electrical charge stored in the battery. From the available 124 kms of range when it left the mountain city limits, it registered a 221-km range as it made its way back to the expressways.