Audi RS e-tron GT
It’s got a strong GT game, but is the range-topping e-tron ‘RS’ enough?
MONTH TWO WITH OUR FIRST ELECTRIC Fast Fleeter has seen it frequently traverse the crowded and roadwork-littered Putney High Street, transporting me back and forth between home and Goodwood for this summer’s evo trackdays and a little car show you might have heard of called the Festival of Speed.
Negotiating busy urban streets is, unfortunately, the reality many of us are dealt when it comes to daily driving, but it’s a task our RS e-tron GT handles rather well. It’s quite a wide car but, in London, so long as you’re not wider than a Routemaster, you’re fine. Interior space in the back of the e-tron is somewhat lacking, but I’m generally a party of one so it’s only the occasional friend who will cry for mercy in the small leather and Alcantara jail cell back there. More important to me is that our electric Audi is superbly refined and perfectly adept at crawling along with an average speed in decimal points rather than double figures.
Once free of the buses, mopeds and, well, more buses, the trip to Sussex is largely smooth sailing along flowing A-roads and motorways, on which the e-tron GT shines with its supple ride and double glazing. The Bang & Olufsen stereo is also very good (except at certain frequencies, which seem to rattle both offside tweeters) and after a few tunes we jump off the A3 and onto some tighter, bumpier roads – which is where all hell breaks loose.
By this I don’t mean that there’s a huge shift to the e-tron’s chassis whereby it suddenly displays superb balance and dynamic capability, but rather that this is the point where the chassis starts to wilt under the heat of more complex roads. The three-chamber air suspension feels very soft, and even with adaptive dampers set at their firmest it just can’t handle the pressure, literally. Small bumps don’t trouble the car too much, but larger undulations can set its 2347kg bulk moving vertically in an uncomfortable manner. Once momentum has taken over, you sometimes feel there’s a risk of a very large, very expensive impact with the tarmac. Indeed, on one occasion the e-tron has proved that it will bottom out rather than hit bump stops.
The steering precision that Porsche engineered into its largely similar Taycan is dialled back in the Audi, which makes the lack of feel that’s common to both cars more acute here. Hit the brakes and you realise that they can’t take the heat either – the pedal is soft, the calibration between regenerative and friction braking inconsistent and vague, but worst of all is when you really need to call on them to bring speed down with urgency. The standard six-piston calipers and silicone-carbide discs (another nod to the RS’S Porsche sibling) simply aren’t powerful enough for a 637bhp car carrying close to two-and-a-half tons. And forget about resilience, because it takes all of one heavy braking input for the stopping ability to be compromised even further.
So the ‘RS’ bit of this e-tron GT is so far proving about as appropriate as the stickers(!) used to add those two letters to the seats (see picture on page 131), but it does at least have the ‘GT’ bit largely sorted.
Date acquired June 2021 Total mileage 4942 Mileage this month 1582 Costs this month £0 mi/kwh this month 2.8