Double dare: Two motors in one makes Audi A3 e-tron an electrifying hybrid

It might be a bit late jumping on the hybrid bandwagon but it looks like Audi is planning a serious assault on the hybrid market.

The streets of downtown Los Angeles are no place for those short of power and image. That goes for cars, too. Most cars get both of those things in the same way: they burn stuff to create mechanical energy, send that through some whizzy, spinning bits before turning the wheels. The Audi A3 e-tron isn't like that. Unlike most cars, it has the ability to drive its front wheels via two motors at once. One of those motors burns fuel, but the other is an electric motor.

Ah, you say, the Prius and its successors have been doing that for years. True, but unlike most hybrids, the A3 e-tron can double as a pure electric car, something a standard hybrid can manage for maybe two or three kilometres of feather-footed commuting at very low speed. The A3 e-tron can do it for 50km – and do it convincingly.

If it’s an eco-friendly image you want to project, nothing does it like an electric car; and if it’s power you want, nothing does it like punching the road with the power of two motors at once. Electric cars might have a cult following, but their limited range brings on a level of range anxiety in others that keeps their wallets closed and their chequebooks aimed at petrol or diesel power.

Due to be released next year, the A3 e-tron is Audi’s answer to BMW’s i3 and any other electric challenger on the market. The plug-in hybrid is capable of taking you to and from work and the shops as a pure electric car and then letting its 1.4-litre, turbocharged petrol engine take over on longer hauls.Essentially adopting the running-gear of the prototype Volkswagen Golf Plug-In Hybrid, the A3 e-tron turns into a surprise packet by being far more sophisticated, far more nuanced and far easier to use than the still-emergent Volkswagen machine.

In Europe, a legion of studies show people are driving between 40km and 50km a day, so the A3 e-tron's battery pack might demand people fill their fuel tanks every three months, instead of once a week. Indeed, even on the European NEDC combined fuel cycle, the A3 e-tron achieves 1.5 litres/100km and emits just 35 grams of CO2/km, but Audi engineers insist that in real-world driving, most of the cars will go weeks without spitting a thing out of their tailpipes. Even with a fuel tank of just 40 litres, Audi insists it will give a range of 940km.

It’s not slow, either. Audi reckons on the car hitting 100km/h in 7.6 seconds and that doesn’t feel off the mark at all, certainly not when we launched it onto LA’s downtown streets.

Packs a punch
Besides looking dorky, the image issue hybrids have had to combat is that they aren't quick, like a warm hatch of the Golf GTi style. Yet this one packs a punch. There is 150kW of total system power and 350Nm ready to torture its front tyres, with the stock Audi 1.4-litre turbocharged four-cylinder petrol motor backed up by 75kW of electric motor. That means its 110kW and 250Nm of fossil-fuelled power has a free-energy back-up.

Audi sticks the 34kg electric motor – which delivers 330Nm of torque alone – between the back of the petrol engine and the front of the six-speed dual-clutch transmission. The major effect of that is that the transmission doesn’t know which engine’s workload it’s dealing with – it’s just accepting a bundle of torque and sending it out again, so it’s theoretically a smoother proposition than putting the electric motor anywhere else in the pretorian.

It’s soon clear to us that this is still in heavy development, though. Audi sends us out with an engineer to explain the ins and outs of it (and there are many), and one of the key points he reiterates is that the integration software is the area getting the most attention right now. “The hardware is there, but we are killing ourselves to get the mapping of everything right,” the boffin admitted.

There weren’t any issues at all in the car’s electric mode. It turns on as a pure electric car, moves off with brilliant assurance as an electric car and then runs convincingly in any traffic we can find. The torque is ultra strong, with instant response every time we take off from the lights, and doesn’t often feel an urgent need for petrol power. Unlike the standard hybrids, the plug-in Audi lets you stand on the throttle in its full electric mode without the software calling in the combustion cavalry.

Unlike the Volkswagen Golf’s upcoming plug-in hybrid, the Audi doesn’t let you fiddle around with all manner of bits and pieces in the setup. Instead, it uses its normal drive select system to drop you into pre-programmed modes: Electric for electric, Sport for sport and Hybrid for hybrid. It also delivers a hybrid-hold mode, so you can save the car’s electric charge for an area where you might need it more (say, commuting into a city from the countryside).

50km range feasible
It's hard to say whether it's capable of the 50km of range from a full charge that Audi insists, but our numbers on a 20km electric run suggest it's feasible, especially given that we went heavy on the throttle the whole time.

The only significant issue we found with the e-tron was the jerkiness of the arrival of the petrol motor, especially from very low speeds. When it’s in its hybrid mode, we expected it to be smoother, but it delivered the sort of disjointed head toss we’d been warned about by our engineer. It’s not there yet.

It’s convincing, yes, but it won’t be cheap compared to a regular A3. You might have to get the calculator out to see how many years you’ll have to drive the e-tron to recoup your investment. But there won’t be another reason not to buy it. Because it’s very, very good right now, and it’s not even here yet.