Audi Q6 Sportback e-tron review

It might sound like damning with faint praise, but one of the virtues of the Q6 Sportback e-tron is that it’s the sort of car that you can just jump in and get on with driving. It feels large on the move (visibility could be better, it’s hard to judge where the car’s extremities are), but will lollop along in a laidback manner.

On the smooth roads around Munich we could immediately see how Audi has largely catered the car to the tastes of its home market. It’s remarkably refined on the autobahn, keeping things hushed all the way past speeds that in the UK would see you in the queue for a bus pass almost as quickly.

So not really that fun to drive then? 

The bulk of the range does a very professional, competent job of getting you about the place, but another surprise is the SQ6, which while falling short of being what you might call ‘fun’ at least combines a startling turn of speed (4.3 seconds to 62mph) with perky handling that tricks you into thinking the car is more lithe and slinky than it really is.

The quattro four-wheel-drive system is more of a psychological boost than a practical one in everyday driving. You’d be perfectly happy in the rear-wheel-drive version, which never really feels like it’s going to trouble the electronic safety wizardry. Whether we’d say the same thing on greasy December roads is another thing.

What about range and powertrain options?

Official WLTP range is 339 miles in the 83kWh car, 408 miles in the RWD performance spec car, 395 in the quattro AWD model and 377 miles in the S-badged car. But how close you get to those numbers depends on how much of the performance you try and use.

There are three flavours of powertrain – your standard setup, then ‘performance’ and ‘quattro’. The entry one only comes with the 83kWh battery and produces 249bhp, upping it to 288bhp for brief periods if you use the launch control feature, when it’ll do 0–62mph in 7.0s (7.6s if you don’t – on all the other models where it’s featured, it only makes a 0.1s difference). 

Performance comes with the big battery and unlocks a higher power of 302bhp, which rises to 322bhp in launch control mode and 6.6s to 62mph. Quattro offers 383bhp whether you like or not (5.9s to 62mph) and the SQ5 is the perkiest with three e-motors producing 482bhp/510bhp and getting the car to 62mph in 4.3s. Top speed is 130mph unless you’re in the SQ5, then it’s 143mph. Phew. We've seen fewer numbers in a sudoku.

And charging? 

How delicately can we put this – there’s been a temptation with some of the EVs emerging out of the Volkswagen Group to chase headline charging figures that you’ll manage for about 30 seconds on an extension cable coming out the side of a nuclear power station, after which electricity dribbles in.

The Q6 Sportback e-tron manages to avoid the worst of this through 800V charging, improved thermal management, and the sheer size of its batteries. But peak charge speeds are 225kW for the smaller battery, 260kW for the larger batteried RWD car and 270kW for the others. Audi says the RWD performance car will get from 10 to 80 per cent in 22 minutes, or to put it another way you’ll get 165 miles in 10 minutes at an appropriately powerful plug.

If all you can find is a 50kW charger you’ll be there for weeks with batteries this size, mind.