A couple of Senior Editor over at Edmunds.com were recently invited to test drive a $2 Million concept prototype of the All Wheel Drive fully electric Audi e-tron. The test drive was limited to 62 mph and lasted only 5 miles but they were allowed on public roads along California's Pacific Coast Highway just north of Malibu at Point Magu flanked by 2 highway patrol cars.
Good to read that Audi has almost come clean on the headline grabbing torque figures they've been announcing for the e-tron. We picked up on this way back when the car was first unveiled in October while the rest of the motoring media have taken a little longer to catch on.
Audi now say the reduction gear ratios for the four in-board wheel motors are 6:1 at the front and 7:1 at the rear. Those numbers are very close to the 8.25:1 used in the Tesla Roadster. Audi are still sticking to their guns by quoting torque output at the wheels instead of the motor shaft but with some minor math we can at lease have an educated guess at the real numbers now.
According to the media test drivers the concept e-tron was unable to keep up with the Dodge Challenger Highway Patrol cars escorting it so we're guessing the demo vehicle was quite a bit short of the 3,319 ft/lb claimed in press releases.
Still, what an awesome piece of automotive technology and we can't wait to see what Audi's engineers, the crew that introduced all wheel drive to World Championship rallying, can do with the sports cars dynamic performance using torque vectoring across four independent wheel motors!
Read the reviews here and here
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