Audi e-tron GT Review & Prices

The Audi e-tron GT is an electric four-door coupe with powerful motors and seats for five people.

As the future of Audi’s RS models, the e-tron GT makes cars like RS6 and RS7 feel like morse-code machines at a Space X Starlink launch.

Like its sister car, the Porsche Taycan, the new RS e-tron GT uses two electric motors – one to drive the front wheels and a second to drive the rears.

This combination produces 598hp as standard, but a two-second overboost function ups this to 646hp when you launch the car. As a result, we blasted the car from 0-62mph in just 3.0 seconds. Perhaps a more relevant acceleration time is the one from 30-70mph, which you tend to use when overtaking or accelerating down a slip road. The RS e-tron GT covered it in a mind-boggling 2.7 seconds.

The Audi RS e-tron GT’s 93kWh battery has slightly less capacity than the Taycan’s 95kWh unit, but still serves up an official 283 miles of range. That’ll be fine for most people, but it’s some way off the 400-mile range you get from a Tesla Model S.

Despite having huge wheels and rubber-band-thin tyres, the RS e-tron GT is perfectly comfortable in Comfort mode, and even when you switch it into Dynamic it’s still fine.

The RS e-tron GT weighs a hefty 2.3 tonnes, which you’d think would prove troublesome on a twisty road, but it isn’t so. The Audi changes direction well, helped by the four-wheel steering, four-wheel drive and rear limited-slip differential, plus the fact that the batteries are stored in the floor, lowering its centre of gravity. It grips strongly, too, but if there’s a downside, it’s that the brakes feel a touch artificial at first.

As with most electric cars, the Audi RS e-tron GT is very quiet indeed, although you can pay a bit extra for it to make a noise. Oh yes, Audi has engineered in an optional unusual electronic ‘whoom’ noise when you accelerate. You can decide whether it’s worth shelling out extra for.

You can charge the RS e-tron GT using rapid 270kW public fast chargers (if you can find one), which will boost its battery from empty to 80% full in just 30 minutes. A new 11kW wireless charging feature will be available in the e-tron GT. This lets you charge your car by parking above a large charging pad – just like wirelessly charging your smartphone.

The Audi e-tron GT was co-designed with Porsche and is based on the same underpinnings as the Taycan. As a result, it looks just as wide and purposeful and has a similar sloping roofline. The rear doors blend into the wide haunches to give the appearance of a sporty coupe, despite the fact it’s a four-door electric car.

The interior features a sizeable touchscreen for the infotainment system, and below it lie conventional buttons for the heating controls – brilliant! There’s also a large, clear digital display in place of conventional analogue dials behind the steering wheel.

The Audi e-tron GT’s long body provides good legroom, but headroom is a little tight for tall passengers in the back, and a central rear passenger will feel decidedly unloved. The e-tron GT features a 366-litre boot, which is accessed through quite a small boot opening. The load area can be expanded by folding down the back seats (which you’ll have to do by opening the rear doors). It also has an 81-litre storage area under the bonnet, although this is pretty much filled by the huge bag for the charging cables.

The Audi e-tron GT starts from £83,285, although that’s for a very basic car in plain white. The faster RS e-tron GT starts from £114,285. Those numbers will rise very quickly indeed when you add a few vital options, such as metallic paint.

You can find a great deal on an Audi e-tron GT at carwow, or opt for a used Audi e-tron GT.

It’s pretty expensive, really, although is close in price to its Porsche Taycan, the car it’s closest to for size and performance.. 

Compare the e-tron GT to an admittedly slower (but far more practical and longer-ranged) Mercedes-Benz EQE, and buying the Benz would leave you with around £7,000 in your back pocket. BMW’s closest rival, for now, is the i4 M50 which can actually beat the standard e-tron GT in the dash to 62mph, but which starts at — wait for it — £20,000 less, and isn’t much less practical, if at all. Tesla’s Model S, for which the company won’t confirm a price at time of writing (it will only do so closer to an actual delivery date, and it’s not quoting delivery dates either) has the Audi well-beaten for range, and is also roomier and more practical.

The e-tron GT might be heavy, but it’s spectacularly light on its toes and good to drive on a twisting road, although the steering could be weightier at speed

In town

For a big car with shallow windows, the Audi e-tron GT is surprisingly good to drive around town. There’s standard rear-wheel steering, which makes it feel far more nimble and easy to shuffle through tight spaces than you might think, while the air suspension (an option on the standard GT, but you get it thrown-in if you get the RS model) means that the ride comfort even over dreadful urban pockmarks is excellent. There’s a high-definition surround-view camera system, which can project a very cool 3D image of the car onto the central screen, and that really helps when parking. The only issue is that the combination of low-slung suspension and that long nose means you can end up scraping the bottom of the bumper on speed ramps if you leave the air springs in their lowest setting. Of course, as a bonus, this being an electric car means that not only is it very refined around town, you also feel that bit more saintly when sitting in traffic with lots of emissions-belching lorries and SUVs.

On the motorway

The e-tron GT is just wonderful on a main road cruise. That air suspension just wafts you along, soaking up the bumps but never letting the body feel loose or floppy. It also cures the traditional electric car problem of having suspension that’s too stiff because it has to cope with the weight of a battery — the air springs give you the best of both worlds. Both the standard e-tron GT and the RS are really fast (bonkers fast in the case of the RS) so long slip roads are lots of fun… There are a couple of downsides, though. The big wheels and low profile tyres mean there’s quite a lot of road roar and rumble when you’re cruising. There’s no wind noise though, thanks to double-glazed side windows.

But we’re not sure about the noise that the car plays through the speakers in Dynamic mode. It’s part distant V8, part Star Trek shuttle, and it’s kind of cool, but it takes some getting used to. Oh, and the small side windows and tiny rear screen can make seeing what’s coming at big junctions a bit tricky.

On a twisty road

What’s truly astonishing about the way the e-tron GT drives is how it copes with corners. You’d think a car weighing the guts of two-and-a-half tonnes would feel hefty and sluggish on a twisty road, but the electric Audi just… doesn’t. Somehow it actually feels quite light and agile (until you need to brake hard — then you notice the weight alright) and it zips and flits through corners like a car of half the weight. It’s truly remarkable, but if we have one nit-picky complaint it’s that for all this excellence, the GT isn’t the most involving car to drive. The steering is just a little bit too light for that. First world problems and all that. Oh, and while we’re at it, although the RS version is fast enough to make it feel like the blood is draining from your feet at full acceleration, it’s not any more brilliant to drive through the corners than the standard car so it may not be worth the extra cash.

There is space for four people, but only just, and the boot is shallow and small

Practicality

The e-tron GT’s cabin is on the tight side. Tall drivers can get comfy in the front thanks to excellent seats, but it’s a deliberately snug environment to emphasise the whole coupe-like feel. It’s not especially practical — you get a decent glovebox and two medium-sized cupholders (into which your left elbow will painfully sit when you try to relax on long journeys) in the front, but storage space is quite limited. There’s a deep tray next to the gear selector, but it’s slightly too small for the larger-screen types of mobile phone. The door pockets are quite small and shallow, and the space under the front armrest is also quite small, although there is a neat vertical wireless phone charger in there (your phone is held in place with a small clip — clever) plus a couple of USB ports. Overall, it’s snug but comfortable, like a well-tailored suit, but beware the dash design — when you open the frameless door, there’s a big spike of dash left sticking out at an angle, just waiting to snag unsuspecting legs. It can be quite painful. On the upside, the driving position is excellent and you get electric adjustment for the steering wheel.

Space in the back seats

Space in the back is better than you might expect. Headroom is a touch tight, but taller people can fit in just fine, while knee-room is actually quite good thanks to big scallops taken out of the backs of the front seats. There are even little scallops cut into the structure of the battery, so you get proper footwells in the back and space for big feet. Audi calls that a ‘foot garage’ — we presume the marketing department took the rest of the day off after coming up with that one. There is technically a middle seat, but we’ve yet to find an actual human who’d be able to get comfortable in it. It’s spectacularly narrow and perched-up, so if you want a fast electric Audi that can carry three people in the back, you’re better off with the e-tron quattro SUV. It’s also quite dark and gloomy in the back, unless you’ve specced your e-tron GT with the panoramic glass roof. The side windows are really shallow and small, and they don’t drop down all the way.

Boot space

To be honest, 366 litres is not a lot. If this were a family hatchback, we’d be complaining about the fact that it’s not even as roomy as the boot in a basic VW Golf. So for a four-seat (technically five-seat, but see above…) GT car that’s capable of crossing continents, such a small boot as this is really quite disappointing. It’s a problem that the Audi shares with the Porsche Taycan, because under the skin they’re basically the same car. Of course, you can change up to the roomier Taycan Sport Turismo estate if you like, but Audi doesn’t yet offer an estate version of the GT, and nor is it very likely to.

For comparison’s sake, a Tesla Model S offers 744 litres of boot space, while even the not-very-massive Mercedes EQE can swallow 430 litres. There are some handy storage trays to each side, and a net for stopping your (small) bags from sliding around the place, but the boot opening isn’t especially big so that’s not very helpful. What is helpful is the addition of a neat fold-down hook for shopping bags, and a 12-volt socket.

The rear seats are split in three, so you can fold them down as needed to shuffle space for stuff with space for people, but there’s no handy lever in the boot to flip them down. For a little extra storage space, there’s a small 81-litre boot in the front (a frunk, or if you’re English, a froot). Mostly it’ll be full of the bag that holds the charging cable, which is utterly massive and bigger than most people’s suitcases.

Gorgeous style, excellent quality, good infotainment. We’re done here

The e-tron GT’s interior is one of Audi’s best. The whole surface of the dash seems to have been vacuum-packed around the screens for the instruments and the infotainment system, creating a really quite dramatic environment. Standard GT models can be fitted with nice wood trim, which creates a pleasantly warm and soft cabin ambience, but the RS comes with hard and aggressive carbon-fibre trim. It depends what you’re into, we suppose…

Quality, as you’d expect from Audi, is just brilliant and the whole cabin feels built to last. The RS model gets a lovely Alcantara suede effect steering wheel (don’t eat crisps when driving or you’ll get that all messy…) but it lacks the neat little RS steering wheel button of the RS6 and RS7 models, which allow you to flip between comfort and sport modes.

The infotainment system is really very good. The central screen isn’t too big nor distracting — at 10.1 inches, we’d say it’s about ‘right-sized’. The menu layout is fairly easy to get your head around, and the screen has haptic response, so it feels like you’re actually pushing physical buttons. Well, sort of anyway. In front of the driver there’s a 12-inch instrument display screen (Audi calls this the ‘virtual cockpit’, presumably named by the same person who came up with ‘Foot Garage’) and the dials and layout can be configured to your taste, with the RS model having extra RS-specific dial designs. It’s all very slick, expensive-looking, and fairly easy to use. Indeed, it’s a much better setup than the too-big, too-distracting screen layouts of some rivals (cough, Tesla, cough Ford Mustang Mach-E).

One neat addition is that thanks to Audi’s live internet connection service, you can not only get real-time traffic data and control some of the car’s functions from your phone, you can also get Google Earth satellite images for the sat-nav. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto come as standard of course, but what we really like is that Audi has kept separate, physical controls for the heating and air conditioning system, which is so much easier to use when you’re on the move — safer too, as you’re taking your eyes off the road for much less time than you would if the controls were on the touchscreen. It’s much better than the screen controller in the A6 and RS6, for instance. There’s an optional head-up display too, which is worth having.

Of course, the e-tron GT’s big USP is that it’s all-electric and zero-emissions (at tailpipe, at any rate). Which is brilliant, and there’s definitely a pleasantly smug feeling that comes from having a car as fast, as handsome, and as good to drive as this and whizzing past petrol stations with not a care in the world.

Well, not quite a care in the world, as the e-tron GT doesn’t quite have the range for that kind of insouciance. It’s pretty good — Audi claims you’ll get up to 298 miles out of a full charge in the standard e-tron GT, and 286 miles out of the RS model, but in real-world conditions that’s likely to be closer to 230 miles, especially if you’re making full use of that RS power output. For a car with a big 83kWh battery (net useable) that’s OK, but not the best. Certainly it’s behind the 405 miles Tesla offers from the standard Model S, while the much-less powerful Mercedes-Benz EQE will squeeze a claimed 397 miles out of one charge.

At least the e-tron GT charges up quickly. Thanks to sharing tech with Porsche, Audi has fitted the e-tron with an 800-volt charging system that can accept a maximum 270kW of rapid charging. What does that all actually mean? It means that, assuming you can find a sufficiently powerful charging point which is working, you can add 62 miles of extra range for every five minutes spent on charge. You can give it an 80% charge in as little as 23 minutes.

For home charging, or slower kerbside chargers, there’s an 11kW AC charging system, but just remember that the e-tron has two charging sockets, one on each front wheelarch. It’s the right-hand side one that gets the rapid DC charging plug, so make sure you pull up on the right side, or you’ll have to back up and try again. The little electric motorised doors that open to reveal the sockets are a nice touch.

The e-tron GT hasn’t actually been tested by the independent crash test experts at Euro NCAP, but the Porsche Taycan has, and that’s basically the same car. The Porsche gets a full five-star rating, but its adult occupant and child occupant scores (85 per cent and 83 per cent) are a little disappointing, and lag behind what the much-more-affordable Kia EV6 managed. 

Standard safety kit includes emergency autonomous braking, parking sensors and cameras, cruise control with a speed limiter and lane departure warning but it seems a bit much to make you pay extra for the ‘Tour Pack’ which comes with radar guidance for the cruise control and uprated steering that actively keeps you in your lane (and which can help you swerve away from danger). That’s a £1,335 option, and ‘City Assist’ pack, which comes with rear crossing traffic alert and a system that warns you if you’re about to open your door into the face of an oncoming cyclist, costs £1,345 extra. Surely on an expensive car like this, such systems ought to be standard? There’s also a £1,760 Parking Assist pack which includes a self-parking system, and a remote control built into the Audi smartphone app which allows you to nudge the e-tron GT a few feet forward out of a tight space, if someone’s parked too close for you to be able to open your door. 

In fairness, all of that does come as standard if you upgrade to the Vorsprung model, and Audi will even throw in a forward-facing night vision camera too, which is proper spy-games stuff. RS versions can be optionally equipped with super-powerful and fade-free carbon-ceramic brakes, but it’s a £5,000 extra…

The e-tron GT has a lot going for it in the reliability stakes. First off, it’s an Audi and Audi tends to make well-made, reliable cars. Secondly, it’s based on a Porsche, and if anything Porsche’s reputation for making well-made, reliable cars is even better than Audi’s. Finally, it’s built in the same factory, and on the same production line, as Audi’s range-topping R8 V10-engined supercar, and that has excellent quality levels, so we’d expect much of that to transfer over to the e-tron. 

There have been some software glitches affecting both the e-tron GT and the Porsche Taycan, but these seem to have been solved quickly, and the e-tron can receive over-the-air software updates which should help with any future issues. There have also been some mechanical recalls for the e-tron GT, involving the rear seatbelt buckles and an issue with the front suspension.