Audi A3 e-tron Sportback 2011 Review - International

The Audi A3 Sportback of the kind on show here is not long for this world – the company has already released images and details of a substantially revised A3 lineup due out in 2012.

But beneath the bodywork lies a crucial part of the marque’s longer term future... Perhaps the most crucial, given this car's decendents' mass-market role in the company’s plans to position e-tron drivetrains first alongside and then ahead of petrol and diesel engines.

Given the saleable reality isn’t due until 2015, you’d think the prototype A3 Sportback e-tron served up to Asia Pacific media for taste-testing in Japan recently would be pretty crude. It’s not. Like the A1 e-tron demoed alongside it in the resort town of Hakone, just outside Tokyo, it’s surprisingly complete.

While the two share the e-tron label, the electric A3 is a very different species to the A1. That machine is a PHEV using a small petrol-powered range extender engine – a rotary in fact. By the explanation of Audi executives on hand, it represents the marque’s transitional phase from fossil fuel power to something akin to what we see here.

With the A3 Sportback e-tron, Audi is out to show what it has in store in the way of mass market, all-electric mobility. By 2020, e-tron variations of each platform will play an equal or dominant part across the entire Audi lineup, the company claims.

That mass-market factor marking this specimen is what differentiates it conceptually from the first e-tron product the company intends to launch. The R8-based electric supercar, set for launch in early 2013, is an exercise in radicalism inside and out, even by futuristic EV standards. It’s a smart move, sashaying out on to the industry’s new catwalk in something so flash and sophisticated amid a raft of tiny city cars and compact hatches.

Nothing so schmick about the A3 Sportback e-tron, however. It’s decidedly prosaic, reflecting its future as a volume seller in its aesthetics. The exterior here is virtually indistinguishable from the donor vehicle, with the charge connection point taking up residence beneath the fuel filler cap. Inside, it looks business as usual, save for a power meter in place of the tacho.

The electric A3 Sportback is technically conventional by EV standards. Up front is a permanent-magnet synchronous motor driving the front wheels through a single-speed transmission. Audi says it’s good for a sustained 60kW with peak bursts of 100kW.

It’s powered by a multi-cell Lithium-ion battery pack divided between three banks, one taking up the transmission tunnel area, one beneath the rear seat and one beneath the cargo area. At 300kg in total, the batteries are major contributors to the car’s beefy 1592kg kerb weight (about 140kg over any IC powered A3 Sportback).

You can tell, too, but not in terms of tardy acceleration. With its full 270Nm available immediately, as is the norm for EVs, the electric A3 isn’t slow. Indeed it feels a fair bit quicker to 60km/h than Audi’s claimed 5.3 seconds; the same applies going on to 100 – 11.2 seconds seems pessimistic. It wasn’t hard on the Hakone test road to get it up near its 145km/h governed top speed.

Where the weight showed was bottoming out amid the gentle undulations of the track – you could feel the mass in its belly pulling it groundwards. The sluggish bounce in the suspension that wasn’t there in the petrol engined A3 Sportback on hand for the purposes of comparison.

The test drive was a quickie – about six kilometres each for the A3 and A1 e-tron prototypes on a there-and-back stretch of the Toyo Tyres Turnpike, closed to the public for the purpose. The nearest thing it offered to a proper corner was the U-turn at the end, giving only the narrowest of insights into how they actually roll.

Pity – I suspect the A3 Sportback, with so much torque and a fair proportion of its extra weight down low and between the axles, wouldn’t be past delivering a novel drive, even if all that bulk is being towed along behind the front wheels.

Audi’s official range figure is 140km, though it’s always necessary to prefix that with ‘up to’. The company claims a nine-hours flat-to-full charge on a standard 230V domestic power supply, reducing to as little as three hours on a 400V three-phase power supply.

The A3 Sportback e-tron shares its A1 sibling’s clever, flexible energy regeneration system. It runs through four phases of intensity, with column-mounted paddle-switches allowing you to flick between 0-1-2-3 settings as you coast uphill, downhill and around corners. The lowest setting is zero, offering full roll, with the regen system ramping up with each flick of the right-hand paddle.

Despite its more powerful motor, the A3 Sportback e-tron is a little slower off the mark than the smaller, lighter A1, thanks in large part to a battery pack of twice the mass. But on full resistance the energy regeneration system still delivers enough braking capacity to render the anchor pedal redundant for all but complete stops, even reining it in from top speed.

Get familiar with the system and you’d find yourself using just toe-tap pressure to stop. It would also without doubt make a useful handling aid in helping manage and harness the extra weight.

It’s pretty brave of Audi to wheel out a prototype this far in advance of its scheduled time to market – it’s not due out until 2015. Even if it’s well advanced for a prototype, it’s still a work in progress. And four years is a long time in this industry. Long enough to get a lot of work done in improving energy density in battery packs. It’s London to a brick we’ll see it go to market with either a substantially lighter battery pack or markedly better performance and range figures from the same mass.

If the A2 Concept revealed at this year’s Frankfurt show is anything to go by, Audi is working plenty hard on weight loss in all sorts of other ways too. The company remains a staunch advocate of the aluminium spaceframe, and that vehicle shows why. Despite similar power and torque numbers to the A3 Sportback e-tron, it’s two seconds faster to 100km/h and goes 60km further, thanks mainly to a weight advantage of nearly half a tonne.

Barrelling along a short stretch of closed road with little past a couple of obtuse bends and a gentle slope didn’t prove much about the car. But given this one’s distance – and no doubt difference – from the final product, that matters little.

This show-and-tell exercise dovetails neatly with the strategy of sending the supercar out first – both bear value as expressions of Audi’s confidence in the path it’s taking into a future fraught with uncertainty.

Read the latest news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at carsales' mobile site…