Audi A6 Sportback e-Tron - long-term review

There’s a small silver piece of trim at the base of the windscreen of our Audi A6 Sportback e-tron. It announces that this car is fitted with the fancy Bang and Olufsen ‘Sound and vision system’, a £2,895 option. However, it’s a pretty good representation of this entire car. Can you guess what happens on a sunny day when you put a highly reflective strip right in the eye-line of the driver? Of course you can. Cue blinding reflections and a constant state of dazzled annoyance. Audi, it seems, threw out everything they knew about cars when creating the e-tron. I hate this thing with a murderous passion.

Why so negative? Well, maybe it’s the fact it has stupid electric door handles and the doors NEVER shut at the first time of asking. The fact that the car’s interior is insanely hot at all times, but when you get in it takes an age for the a/c to fire up. And it’s barely adequate even at its ‘Max’ setting. Despite which it defaults to ‘Eco’, of course.

Perhaps it’s the ‘Efficiency Assist’ system that uses navigation data to read upcoming junctions or curves and adjusts the regenerative braking to suit. So, for example, you lift off and there’s a roundabout ahead. In this instance, the e-tron will slow rapidly to assist you. But if you lift for a gentle curve it will coast along merrily. In other words, the car behaves radically differently almost every time you lift the throttle. It is infuriating, the very definition of inconsistent and deeply patronising. Luckily, you can turn this off and choose between D (which coasts with no form of braking effect) or B (which stands the car on its nose every time you lift).

Maybe it’s just that when you jump in and press the start/stop button it often won’t select a gear. So, you need to press it again. But other times, you press the start/stop button and it switches the car off. It’s like every interaction has been designed to defy logic, change at random and to put barriers in the way of the simple act of driving. Considering the joy of an EV should be how easy it is to drive with no gearbox to worry about and the luxury of silence, this Audi is constantly getting in its own way. Did I say quiet? The e-tron has an incredible amount of tyre noise, too.

There’s more. The fact it’s always telling me I’m about to crash as I thread my way past parked cars in my village. That it’s so huge but isn’t that big on the inside (the ample rear legroom undone by the fact you can’t slide feet under the driver’s seat due to the skateboard chassis). The usual niggle that the real-world range isn’t even close to the claimed 428-miles.

Mostly it’s the sense that Audi has decided that EVs must be different for the sake of being different and have thrown out all the good stuff they’ve learnt over decades of building cars. For its primary function is still to be a car. Makes you wonder why you’d pay a premium for an Audi when it feels like it was built by a start-up still grappling with the fundamentals. It’s a staggering capitulation.