Audi A1 e-tron 2010 Review - International

So this is strange... Audi has us driving what it calls a prototype of its A1 e-tron. This car was launched at the Paris Motor Show in late 2010 and looks, for all the world, like it's ready for business. It drives like it, too.

E-tron is Audi's umbrella name for its electric machinery and that should be a hint that this A1 is something different to the clean, logical but slightly underwhelming A1 you see in the shops. The A1 e-tron is a series hybrid and a plug-in hybrid, too. It all means that, while it has a small petrol motor onboard, it only ever runs as an electric car.

In fact, the e-tron can stretch to 50km of pure electric running on one charge of its lithium-ion battery pack. After that you'll need to either plug it in for a recharge or let the onboard petrol-fuelled rotary engine do the job for you. Let the quiet little rotary running to help the electrics and it will stretch the range out to 250km -- though the petrol engine has no connection whatsoever to the wheels or the transmission, and so it never does more than charge up the batteries.

And that's how it drives. It's just a pure electric car, albeit a smooth, organised, beautifully built electric car. With its electric motor up the front, its battery pack mostly under the back seat, the rotary engine sits beneath the cargo area.

The thing that's really strange about this car is Audi's insistence that it's at least four years away from production. It's just so good now that it could be sold -- and would find buyers -- today. Even if the Sanyo-sourced lithium-ion batteries are expensive and the AVL-built rotary is a hand-built test motor, the thing just feels, well, right.

Rolling laboratory or not (Audi will trial a fleet of 30 of A1 e-trons in Germany next year), the A1 e-tron has its own, individual interior treatment, with its own dashboard design and its own dials. And they all work. The long list of transmission options has gone, too, because it's only got drive, reverse and neutral from its one-speed gearbox, so you pluck drive and step silently from the brake pedal to the accelerator.

It's a beautifully refined car at low speeds. It's quiet, it's utterly free from vibrations and it's strong, with an instant response to the throttle. And it's not slow -- squeeze down on the throttle and the A1 spurts forward in an instant surge of torque that can take it to 100km/h in 10.2 seconds on its way to its 130km/h top speed.

The sense of acceleration is helped by the fact it's an utterly silent surge, with the serenity interrupted only by a little whine from the gearbox and, as the speed rises, the noise of the tyres rolling over the tarmac.

The electric motor is good for 75kW and 240Nm but only for fleeting bursts. Its normal output (or continuous output, in the burgeoning electric car language) is 45kW and 150Nm.

The 270 volt battery pack carries only 12kW/h of energy (about half the onboard electrical capacity of the Nissan LEAF and can, theoretically, be eked out to 55km or zapped out at full throttle in less than 15 minutes. Yet that last number is unlikely to happen, because unlike petrol-engined cars, the e-tron can recover some of its wasted energy. Audi claims it picks up about a third of its urban requirements by briefly turning the electric motor into a generator to recover energy every time the car coasts or brakes to a halt.

Like most electric cars you can select how aggressive you want the recuperation to be. It can be set strong enough that you won't need the brakes so much around town.

Unlike the LEAF (and Carsales HQ's iMiEV), however, if the A1 e-tron looks like it's going to run out of juice, it simply fires up its onboard genset.

Rotary motors have a reputation for being thirsty and loud and emitting plenty of CO2 from burnt lubricants, but not this one. For starters, it doesn't operate across a wide rev range, because the 254cc motor switches on and runs at a constant 5000rpm, punching out 15kW.

"Think of the rotary as a spare can of petrol for the electric motor and you'll be on the right track," A1 e-tron project leader, Dietrich Englehart, suggested.

"Megacity customers will run 90 per cent of the time with just the electric motor, so the rotary's consumption is not a big issue. As much as anything, it's there for the driver's confidence and if you live in cities, there's a chance you'll never get it to switch on. It's 65kg for the whole range extender box, with the generator, and one third of that is the engine. The thing's only got two moving parts..."

So rarely does the rotary engine run, Audi claims a combined fuel economy figure of 1.9L/100km and a CO2 figure of 42 grams/km.

The other key point is that the battery will charge in three hours on a household socket, so most house-office-house journeys won't even start the rotary engine, which Audi prefers to call  the Range Extender.

Even when it kicks in, which we only managed to induce once, the rotary is near silent and utterly smooth, which is exactly in keeping with the electric car's whole rationale. Audi suggests you might have to fill the 12-litre fuel tank once a year -- if you're unlucky.

It's also working on a better satellite navigation to take into account the growing number of cities with 'green zone' areas where internal combustion engines aren't allowed. The plan is to organize the car's computer around your route, taking into account traffic lights and hills, to have the range extender fully charge the battery before you enter the green zone, then switch off while you travel through it.

Though the A1 e-tron rides and handles better than the conventional A1, it's the power delivery of the electric drive that impresses the most -- that and the complete absence of any obvious flaw in the system. It always seems like it's got more performance on tap and it has you riding a rubber band of torque that starts immediately. It also means that, when you want more for overtaking, it's always got more and there's no waiting for the revs to climb. It's just there.

Which makes it all the more disappointing that the A1 e-tron isn't on sale now... 2015, the year Audi says it's slated for production, can't come soon enough.

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