RADY PLAYER ONE
My son drove this car before I did. He's 13. No laws were broken. My phone rings while I'm being shown around the car by Christian Koch, the VGT's technical project manager. A breathless voice at the other end: "Have you driven it yet?" "Hey, Luke, er, no, in about 20 minutes or so, I think. Why?" "Well," and I can clearly detect a giddy excitement at the other end, trying desperately to masquerade as nonchalance, "I already have. Can you just check a couple of things for me? I think the brakes are a bit rubbish and the handling seems clumsy. It's very fast, though." A quick snigger and the line goes dead. This is the trouble we now have. Well, that I have as parent to an irritatingly precocious child, and that we as car enthusiasts have when car firms create cars designed solely for the virtual world. Sure, this car is a physical reality, and here it is driving around, but it’s a one-of. It’ll accompany the Formula E circus around the world and then it’ll be of to gather dust somewhere.
But in the land of pixels and fast-twitch thumbs, the Audi e-tron Vision Gran Turismo has a much richer life. One where it can be bought for a million credits and raced against all the other virtually engineered cars from the likes of Bugatti, Hyundai, Mercedes, Infiniti, Subaru et al, competing on amazing tracks in outlandish scenescapes.
We’ve seen these VGT cars before. The diference is that this is the frst real-world Vision Gran Turismo car that shares an exact mechanical package with the car in the game. It’s all-electric, three motors (one on the front axle, two on the rear), each developing 272bhp for a combined 815bhp. Steel space-frame chassis, hefty battery packs, 1,450kg kerbweight. It’s padded out with various motorsport bits (DTM ceramic brakes and steering wheel, fat 305-width slick tyres) that lend it an air of credibility, while the batteries and motors are from, well, Koch won’t say: “All I can tell you is that they’re from our development programme, not our Formula E car.” I doubt the VGT will have a secondary life as a future tech test bed, but it does at least talk to Audi’s electric plans for the future (the e-tron lands this summer) with tech that links the actual world with the virtual.
Anyway, a power-to-weight ratio of 562bhp/ tonne puts this in the McLaren 720S league, and
Audi claims a 0–62mph time of 2.5secs. Neuberg test track near Ingolstadt suits it well – lots of slow corners for the e-motors to deliver instant shove out of, which they do with a smooth, pin-you-back surge. But as we’ve found with other such electric cars, after the initial punch of pace, the acceleration starts to tail of.
That’s fne, because any more acceleration could have been troubling. The ceramic brakes need real heat to work properly, and on more than one occasion in the frst few laps, I’m glad that those fat slicks have good bite into corners that I’ve arrived at faster than intended. The front end may bite well, but there’s not a great deal of tactility or feedback. It’s all a bit one-dimensional – again, it’s a one-of, so I doubt Audi has poured that much resource into it.
Unlike the virtual car. The man driving the e-tron before me was Kazunori Yamauchi. Yes, him, Mr Gran Turismo, “We’ve never had an EV with a single front motor and twin motors at the back in the game before” he says. “So we had to adapt and engineer our systems and, with 1,000 parameters to code, that took about a year of work. And I have a feeling this isn’t the end of the e-tron – it might evolve further.”
But only in the game. Where, it turns out, Audi hasn’t turned its back on the internal combustion engine. There’s also a hybrid Audi VGT, featuring a 3.4-litre V6 and twin e-motors for a maximum power of 1,274bhp. More powerful. Needless to say that’s the one Luke had a go in. He was still right about the way it drives, though.