Our Cars: Audi S e-tron GT farewell

So the thing to do is run the battery down to 10 or 20 per cent, then charge at a service station. Choose a fast charger and you might be plugged in for 30 minutes or so – about as long as it takes to stretch your legs, go to the loo and eat a burger and fries. One thing I’ve realised about EV life is that charging on very long drives like this one is less of a nuisance than middle distance trips. If I’m driving for five hours, I want to be parked up for 30 minutes, so I may as well be charging.

Meanwhile, and by way of example, home to Gatwick and back is just a bit more than the Audi can handle on a single charge. That means stopping somewhere, which is always a bit annoying when you’re rushing to the airport or you just want to get home.

To Cumbria. I knew I wanted to charge before pulling off the motorway for the final blast to Cockermouth and my bed for the night, which meant either Tebay services on the M6 or the Moto 20 miles further south. Have you seen Tebay? It’s wonderful, like a charming little farm shop scaled up and plonked beside a motorway. Readers in the south might be more familiar with Gloucester services, part of the same group. The food is good, the building modern and bright, the toilets spotless. It should be a no brainer.

But the chargers at Tebay are only rated at 150kW. Quick, but not electrifying, if you’ll forgive the pun. Meanwhile, the charge points at Moto promise up to 350kW, which would save me a chunk of time. So I pulled off there, instantly regretting my impatience when I saw the terrible state of the place and the pitiful selection of food.

The return journey was little better. I sat in four separate traffic jams, the whole trip taking an hour and a half longer than it should. But on the plus side, I stopped at Hopwood Park on the M42 where I knew there were new chargers that fired electrons at your car like bullets from a Gatling gun, so at least replenishing the battery was simple enough. But I noted as I unplugged the car that had I arrived 10 minutes later, I’d have been queuing to plug in.

In summary, even with good charging experiences on a long drive like that, you’d still rather be in an ICE car. The freedom of the open road no longer applies, because you have to pick your way between charge points, never wandering like you can with petrol power. It’s like painting by numbers. I suppose that’s fine if you just want to get where you’re going and you’ve researched your stopovers, but that’s just getting about the place. It’s not driving like I imagine it.

So that’s how I feel about EVs now that this one is departing my life after half a year. When all I want is to get somewhere local to home, I would rather be in an electric car. I like the smoothness, the quiet, the power. It’s effortless and relaxing. But the moment you start interacting with the public charge network, or you want to drive just for pleasure, battery cars fall flat. I suppose the ideal solution, for me at least, would be to have one small EV at home for all my local journeys, then a petrol car for everything else. But as long as we’re living in ideal worlds, I would like one large petrol car for family duties and one sporty petrol car for my own pleasure, meaning that my small EV would be relegated to a third car. And that would be a very privileged position to be in indeed.

If I had to summarise my position on electric cars in just a few words, that would be it: they make the perfect third car.

And this Audi? It’s been magnificent, though not perfect. It is bigger than I need my everyday car to be, both nose to tail and across its mighty flanks, which makes parking and town driving more effortful than I’d like. What’s more, and given its size, it isn’t exactly cavernous inside. There have been one or two minor annoyances, like the infotainment system that sometimes takes a while to recognise my phone and the car’s sometimes glitchy mobile app, but nothing more serious than that. A few times it’s flashed up a warning message upon awakening along the lines of ‘electrical fault, contact workshop’, but the old switch-it-off-and-on-again trick has worked every time.

The only meaningful criticism I have, and it applies to every single car of its type, is the rate at which it loses value. Think piano, cliff edge, big push and you’ll have the right idea. With optional extras this was a £120,000 car when new, and looking at older e-tron GTs for sale in the classifieds, I reckon its trade in value after three years will be something like £50,000. Call it £2000 a month. Fine if you’re buying it as a company car, which most are; absolutely ruinous if you’re not.

That’s where we stand with high-end EVs right now, but it does mean there are some great deals to be done on pre-owned e-tron GTs. If you’re tempted, you have my full support.

In six months and just over 7000 miles, the Audi never came close to matching its maker’s claimed 370-mile range, which seems par for the course. But the range readout was always dependable – quite often it would actually come down more slowly than the trip meter would rise. In cold weather I reckon its real-world range is around 230 miles, rising to 270 miles or so in more temperate conditions. In winter the car delivered 2.5 miles per kWh, but during this beautiful spring we’ve been enjoying, it’s returned more like 3.0.

One of the big lessons for me is that massive EV horsepower isn’t all for show. This one delivers a peak output of 671bhp, but only in launch control mode. The rest of the time it’s putting out a bit less than 600bhp, which is still enough to make the S e-tron GT one of the most accelerative cars on the road. That’s genuinely useful when squirting through gaps in traffic or joining a fast moving roundabout or motorway. It also makes overtaking effortless and safe. In this Audi, the likelihood you’ve got more accelerative punch than the next car is roughly 100 per cent, and I’ll miss that.

And the car itself? If we’re talking sensible considerations only, like safety, comfort, refinement, ease of use and so on, it’s been one of the very best cars I’ve lived with. But it never became more than a tool to me, not like the BMW M2 I ran a little while ago, nor some of the cars I’ve owned personally over the years. It seems if I’m to really connect with a car over time, to want to keep it forever, that car still needs gears, pistons and a healthy appetite for hydrocarbons.

Photography by George Peck