Audi simply unveiled its newest manufacturing car, and it’s a stunner. The Audi e-tron GT is a battery-powered, all-electric sports activities automobile, with—in top-performing $140,000 RS guise—motors on the entrance and rear axles able to producing 637 horsepower. This gives the sporty four-door with the power to speed up from zero to 60 m.p.h. in about three seconds. Should you’re not fairly so aggressive with the go pedal, it also needs to have the ability to eke out nicely over 200 miles of vary on a cost.
Growth of its electrical car (EV) lineup—which at the moment consists of the pedestrian-looking e-tron SUV—is a high precedence for Audi, which for years has staked out a place as a forward-thinking luxurious model, fast to embrace new types and tech. “Fifty years in the past, Audi was nothing in comparison with our major rivals Mercedes and BMW,” says Marc Lichte, the model’s world design director. “And the rationale why Audi grew to become profitable was that Audi made some actually daring and progressive choices.” For Lichte, these embody common implementation of the marque’s Quattro four-wheel-drive system, its use of light-weight aluminum within the underpinnings of its vehicles, and its abidance of superior aerodynamics, as within the radical Audi 5000 of the Nineteen Eighties.
Designing an EV—with out the constraints of such onerous factors as an engine, transmission, exhaust system, or fuel tank—was liberating for Lichte. “I’ve completed with my group greater than 100 vehicles. However e-tron GT is the spotlight,” Lichte says. It’s because it encompasses most of the parts that automobile designers usually embody in idea vehicles—automobiles meant to predict an evanescent automotive future. “We prefer to sketch vehicles like this: huge wheels, brief entrance and rear overhangs, low cabin, lengthy wheelbase,” says Lichte. “That is dream proportions, and this dream grew to become a actuality with this bundle.”
Not that the design was with out difficulties: “We wished to give you a really low automobile. However there’s this enormous battery pack within the ground. So the problem was to discover a technical resolution to seek out house for the rear passengers,” Lichte says. “The answer was that the battery pack isn’t all one layer, like a chocolate bar. It has completely different layers.” So it’s recessed the place rear passengers’ toes will go, and is thicker beneath their seat. This permits the automobile to be two inches decrease than the already sporty Audi A7 sports activities sedan.