For much of my lifetime, the auto industry has been dominated by the German carmakers. As they battled for supremacy, their engineers came to dictate what we think of as performance and luxury in cars. Now the battleground is a new generation of electric vehicles, and the Germans are playing catch-up. Hyundai stole a march on them as the first established OEM with an 800 V platform that charged faster and drove more efficiently than anything else we’d seen to date, and those cars continue to accrue plaudits. Soon, BMW will launch its Neue Klasse platform with the iX3, and our first drive in Mercedes-Benz’s new CLA was promising. But Audi was the first of the German companies to ready its own purpose-built 800 V EV platform, and it has followed up the Q6 e-tron SUV with today’s pair of electric fastback sedans, the A6 Sportback e-tron and its hotted-up variant, the S6 Sportback e-tron.
Yes, technically, Audi had an 800 V EV a while ago, a rebadged version of the mighty Porsche Taycan. That car still exists and now goes extremely quickly, but the A6’s architecture—called Premium Platform Electric, or PPE—takes lessons from the Taycan and combines them with the latest in software-defined vehicles, where a handful of powerful computers replace hundreds of individual discrete controllers around the car. It all comes wrapped up in a highly aero-efficient shape that still manages to light up the relevant bit of a car-spotter’s brain that identifies Audis.
A6 or S6?
In Europe, there’s the option of a proper station wagon version, or Avant in Audi-speak; we might see that body variant for an RS6 Avant e-tron in the future, but for now, it’s just the A6 and S6 Sportbacks. Both variants use the same 100 kWh (94.4 kWh useable) battery pack, made up of prismatic cells. The A6 can be had in rear- or all-wheel drive; the former makes do with a 375 hp (280 kW) drive unit, the latter with a combined 456 hp (340 kW) thanks to an asynchronous motor on the front axle that complements the rear’s permanent magnet synchronous motor. Actually, both those power outputs are for peak power, should you engage launch control. Nominal power output is a little lower, at 362 hp (270 kW) and 422 hp (315 kW), respectively.
