Our Cars: Audi A6 Avant e-tron quattro

This isn’t just a long-term test of a car, but a long-term test of the sort of car we’ll all be living with soon enough, unless we choose to stick to older ones instead. It’s an EV of course, but it also has all the latest ADAS and connectivity systems, and in many ways you interact with it more like you would a piece of tech than a traditional car.

I’m nine weeks into my time with the Audi A6 Avant e-tron quattro – long enough to understand what life with cars might look like in years to come. Here’s one little snapshot. Every time I start the car, it wants me to punch in a PIN to unlock my driver profile. Then I have to go into the driver assistance submenu, turn off the speed limit warning and lane keep assist (the latter in particular is just too irritating to bear; more in a moment), meaning that even before I’ve entered my destination or found something to listen to, I’ve jabbed at the big central touchscreen 10 times.

That’s what the start of every journey looks like nowadays. I don’t particularly have a problem with that, but it’s definitely less evocative than pushing a key into a barrel, twisting it and prodding the throttle pedal to help the engine fire into life. Not that we have to do that in modern ICE cars these days either.