DMcDnald

Tesla is upgrading to 250 kw chargers, which the Model 3 can take advantage, at least for a brief period of the charge cycle. If I were to go with the e-Tron, most of my charging would be at home.

pkulak

Be careful holding up Tesla Superchargers as some kind of Golden God here. I've used them a bit, and it's almost always underwhelming. They are usually split, so that 120 turns into 60 or less. And that's if there's no line because they spent so many years giving away free charging for life; there are LOTs of people who make it their mission in life to recoup their luxury car purchase price by living at chargers, a couple bucks at a time. Audi is giving away some juice with the car, but it's limited, and after that charging is actually quite expensive. Plus every single charger is dedicated.

Yes, Tesla has _announced_ Supercharger 3.0, but they also announced full self driving would be here 2 years ago. With Tesla you look at exactly what's currently deployed and make absolutely no further assumptions. I currently drive South to Eugene and North to Vancouver a couple times a year. Both of which are _currently_ covered by EA chargers.

SchwarzS6

I also want to see a cold weather comparison of all of the current generation EV’s. I want to know how much range I lose if I take a drive in 10˚ weather when starting from my garage, just off the charger and from a parking lot at a ski area. Oh, and add to that my wife who hates to be cold so the interior temp needs to be at 72F and her seat heater stays on full power for the entire trip.

BlackOptic

Here’s a question, does this make sense? A or B.

A) your e-tron has a 204 mile range. Audi builds in a healthy buffer for the battery to keep it less stressed. You will replace the battery your cost after 12 years.
B) Audi releases more battery range - increased to 244 miles [i.e. some more miles than the I-pace], the full battery needs replacement in 8 years. Your cost.

[don’t focus on the actual numbers of years I suggested... the question is more whether you would trade range for long life, or not.]

alexlear

This depends of the battery chemistry, however, many Tesla owners have pooled their data to understand the long term degradation. The results are actually very promising, maintaining >90% after 160,000 miles. I think the e-tron battery buffer is a good idea based on Audi's vehicle goals, however, opening up more capacity doesn't seem to have been a problem for Tesla. Maybe Audi will open up some more buffer on future model years once they have more long term data.

https://electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla...radation-data/

JeffSmith

Could Audi release more range via a software update?

hrc1079

Thats the problem. Audi is a traditional auto company and do a poor job at software updates. They don’t do OTA and when you go to the dealer you only get an update if it’s security / bug related, not feature additions. I don’t see them changing so you buy the car, don’t expect any enhancements to come to it via software.

DMcDnald

Here's an option C. The e-tron is very well appointed. As a car you may want to keep it many years. However, with rapid improvements in battery tech and batteries getting cheaper to build, maybe you'd want to replace it (swap it out) with a significantly better battery with much better range in 5ish years. Who know?

alexlear

I would love that option C but I'm not convinced Audi will do it because they will want you to buy a new car instead. If there's a compelling battery breakthrough available to a wide market, we might see this from a 3rd party pack producer at a premium price but only if the e-tron sells in large quantities and doesn't change form factor. There's probably a good chance this will happen for Tesla vehicles for this reason. In the early day of the Prius there were kits to put in a larger battery and make it a plug-in Prius.

There isn't much precedent for this. People don't usually put a newer engine in their ICE cars because at the point they're ready for this, the rest of the car is failing, unsafe, or lacks new tech.

LavaGrau_A3

I haven't gotten around to reading the manual yet. It sounds as though the e-tron will not be able to OTA update the "electric machine" software the way Tesla can, but will Audi be able to OTA capture data from the fleet for analysis? This would be critical to them considering reducing the buffer size. Not being able to harvest performance data from the fleet would be a huge miss for Audi and their product development. Probably more so than not being able to do OTA updates. Audi has a pretty large dealer network. Some owners of Teslas live nowhere near a service center and appointments can be a long wait. I'm not hugely put off by the lack of OTA updates for the e-tron's drive system.

• Any range unlocked from the buffer would be minimal. Cutting the buffer in half would yield about 10-15 miles. Just about what the 19" wheels save over the 21" ones.
• The chance of Audi putting in a larger battery are near zero. A larger battery would need a longer wheelbase platform. You can see from the way they packed a second layer under the rear seat that space is at a premium.
• By the time newer technology batteries are ready, the platform will have been replaced by something lighter and more optimized. The VW MEB platform hasn't even entered serial production yet, was designed specifically for BEV's, and VW has already said minimal chance that they will be able to update existing cars to new battery tech.

IMO, the e-tron is what it is. Buying one in the hopes that Audi will dramatically improve it later isn't realistic. Minor tweaks maybe, major improvements are unlikely.