- 2 months ago
The Audi S e-tron GT impresses as a fast, comfortable electric grand tourer with real long-distance ability, and this quick first-hand impression focuses on what it’s like to live with on the road. After driving it for several hundred kilometers to and from an event near Silesia Ring in Poland, the main takeaway is simple: the range is decent, the car is very slippery, and the 800-volt fast-charging setup can make motorway travel surprisingly easy when the charger cooperates.
This is not a full review or a test drive, but a rough, honest commentary on the Audi S e-tron GT’s strengths and weak spots. There’s praise for the comfortable seats, good visibility, quiet cruising, physical buttons, and the way the car handles long highway runs, plus some criticism of the cramped phone storage, piano black trim, and haptic steering-wheel controls. The video also touches on size, practicality, frunk space, trunk space, and how the car compares with other electric GTs and the Porsche Taycan underneath.
For anyone searching for an Audi S e-tron GT review, Audi e-tron GT impressions, electric grand tourer commentary, EV road trip range, fast charging, or real-world motorway driving, this is a useful first-person take. It’s especially relevant if you want a practical EV ownership perspective, long-distance charging experience, and a candid look at what a premium electric performance car is like outside the showroom.
This is not a full review or a test drive, but a rough, honest commentary on the Audi S e-tron GT’s strengths and weak spots. There’s praise for the comfortable seats, good visibility, quiet cruising, physical buttons, and the way the car handles long highway runs, plus some criticism of the cramped phone storage, piano black trim, and haptic steering-wheel controls. The video also touches on size, practicality, frunk space, trunk space, and how the car compares with other electric GTs and the Porsche Taycan underneath.
For anyone searching for an Audi S e-tron GT review, Audi e-tron GT impressions, electric grand tourer commentary, EV road trip range, fast charging, or real-world motorway driving, this is a useful first-person take. It’s especially relevant if you want a practical EV ownership perspective, long-distance charging experience, and a candid look at what a premium electric performance car is like outside the showroom.
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MotorTranscript
00:00Hello! Today I'm behind the wheel of the Audi e-tron GT S or is it S e-tron GT?
00:09Well, anyway, it's one of those and join me for a quick talk-through of my
00:17thoughts after driving this car for 700 kilometers in just two days.
00:37Okay, good morning! This is an Audi e-tron GT, so basically a Porsche Taycan with an
00:43Audi badge on it. Some differences, but never mind. What am I doing with this car?
00:50I've been invited by Audi to a truck event in another part of Poland. There's a
00:57truck called the Silesia Ring, 350 kilometers from Warsaw and to get there
01:02Audi was kind enough to lend me this e-tron GT. I was supposed to get an Audi A5,
01:09whatever that looks like these days, but they said, oh no, you're gonna drive the
01:13e-tron. Now, I was a bit concerned that I'm going to have charging problems on the
01:23way, but spoiler alert, everything worked out thanks to very fast charging. Now, I
01:31have 48 hours with this car. Literally, I picked it up on the day I was supposed to
01:36leave to the truck. The truck day was yesterday. I came back last night and
01:42today, before I'm handing it over, I thought I'm gonna record a few words
01:47about this car. So, this is not my full definitive review. These are just my
01:52thoughts on how this car works in an optimistic scenario. When the Taycan came
01:57out and the e-tron soon after that, the headline news was fast charging 800 volt
02:04architecture and charging up to 270 and probably in later updates 300 something
02:11kilowatts, which is very, very fast. If you take your VW ID, whatever, 4 or 5 or
02:21whatever these things are called, you have like, I don't know, 150, 170 kilowatt
02:25charging. Of course, slightly smaller battery, I think up to about 80 kilowatts these
02:30days. These things have 100 kilowatt battery, slightly more gross, slightly
02:37less net. I think it's 97 kilowatt hours net. Anyway, with 300 ish kilowatt charging, you
02:46can really spend maybe 10 minutes plugged into a charger and you're on your way
02:54again. This car on motorways, so in Poland that's 140 kilometers per hour and then
03:01there are dual carriage ways where you can do 120. This car will do about 400
03:07kilometers doing speeds like that, which is pretty extraordinary for an EV these
03:12days because most EVs when you drive them above 120 kilometers per hour, they'll
03:17barely reach 300. Again, part of it is the big battery, also aerodynamics. This car is
03:23very slippery, but it makes a difference. Now, the truck, as I said, is 350 kilometers
03:30away from Warsaw, so I would have made it on a single charge, but I didn't know what
03:35the infrastructure would be like at the hotel. And anyway, I wasn't the only
03:38journalist traveling in an e-tron or other electric out. Oh yeah, electric Audis are
03:45called e-tron these days. So yeah, there are plenty of electric Audis traveling, so I
03:49thought, to be on the safe side, I'll set the state of charge at destination at 50%.
03:55And yeah, that's fine, that's doable. So with about 40-ish, 44% battery state of
04:04charge, we stopped at a Ionity charger which spits out up to 350 kilowatts. It said
04:11we have to spend there, I don't know, 10-15 minutes. We met some friends, fellow
04:16journalists who, two of them were already there, another couple arrived after we
04:21were already plugged in. Anyway, so we spent more time there than we needed. We
04:25got to the hotel with plenty of, with plenty of charge left. Quick charge at the
04:32truck the next day, just to be on the safe side, so I wouldn't have to stop. And I
04:36would have gotten from the truck home 350 kilometers, and I would have around 100,
04:41it, which is, again, decent. I would have plugged into my home wall box and be golden
04:47by, by today morning. However, I decided to see if the fast charging thing wasn't a fluke,
04:54so I resumed navigation with charging, and it stopped me in Warsaw at a, at another high
05:02power charging station for another seven minutes. I literally took out a stopwatch, and with
05:09connecting and disconnecting, plugging, unplugging the car, and all the authorization
05:14business going on in the background, it took me eight minutes. This was next to a
05:19shopping mall, so basically I wouldn't be even able to go to the shopping mall and
05:23do any shopping, because I would be done before I reached any, any store and grabbed
05:27stuff. So it can work very fast, assuming you have a very fast charger available,
05:33because many chargers around here are 100 or less kilowatts, and then it takes ages and
05:41all the pleasure of it evaporates. Then the electric, electric trip becomes a nuisance.
05:50But when everything works well, we're golden. What I would like for the future electric cars
05:57to be is to be able to charge really fast, even with a smaller battery. I mean, in the city,
06:04you don't need a 2.3 ton car. If you're driving a, whatever, Citroën EC3 or whatever their Stellantis,
06:13its Stellantis brethren is called, you're fine as long as you would be able to take it out of the
06:20city,
06:20and maybe drive somewhere further without having to spend, whatever, 40 minutes at a charger every
06:28150 kilometers, realistically. I don't mind stopping every 150 kilometers. I'd rather not stop for half
06:36an hour. I'd rather stop for 15 minutes. When we solve this charging issue, we're already fine with
06:43electric mobility. That, or we can really extend the range. 400 kilometers is decent,
06:49not great, but decent. If we could get 400 kilometers from a tiny car with a small battery,
06:57that would be nice as well. But we're not there yet, so we're either stuck with 2.3, 2.5
07:04ton cars like
07:05this one, which is 2 meters wide and probably around 5 long, or we have to get tiny city cars
07:11which
07:12aren't very good outside the city. Speaking of the size of this car, I remember that when I drove the
07:17Taycan five years ago, the first thing I did was curb it because it was very wide and all these
07:23cameras
07:24and sensors turn on in various scenarios except when I was close to the curb. This one, I got a
07:30feel for
07:31it relatively quick and it's nice and easy to drive. It's an easy driving car. It's a GT. It's mind
07:40-bogglingly fast.
07:43I have a little stretch of road where I do my zero to 100 test. I didn't measure zero to
07:50100, but I know
07:52where the quarter mile mark is more or less. And in a fast petrol car, I would get to the
08:00quarter mile
08:01mark at 170-180 kmph and that's a fast petrol car. In this one, I let off the accelerator pedal
08:12before
08:13the quarter mile mark because I was exceeding 200 kmph. That's how fast this is and this is the slowest
08:21of the e-tron GT bunch. On the track, I drove the RS e-tron GT, which made me physically
08:32sick. That's how it sticks to the road
08:35with the traction control in whatever sport settings.
08:41Okay, I'm taking you to Silesia ring now, where I had the opportunity to drive the e-tron GT RS
08:51on track and
08:53yeah, I was wondering about the traction control in comfort mode, where I felt that the car was a bit
09:02lost, but now
09:03when I'm driving it first in dynamic and then RS mode, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. It's
09:11actually, it's actually so quick. I'm close to being physically sick actually. I feel like I'm about to puke.
09:24There is like a lot of g-force. Oh boy, thank god we're doing just two laps because
09:36oh boy, this is way too much. I've driven two RS6s Avance with petrol engines and they were nothing
09:49compared to this. Nothing. On the road, this car with regular traction control on, you can feel it
09:56working and it's not very pleasant, but then it's not a car for sliding around. You don't want to slide
10:03a 2.3 ton car on a public road or to be honest anywhere because it's just not made for
10:09it. I know
10:10they do at the driving experience. They have those taxi rides with the race drivers and you know,
10:18they will shred tires, etc. But I don't think you're going to do this in this car. You're going to
10:25drive
10:25it as a regular car and it's very comfortable. It's very good on long roads, long road trips
10:31because it's relatively quiet. It's got good aero. So no, not a lot of wind noise. Perfect for that.
10:38Not necessarily for the city. Now this car is based on the Taycan. Both of these cars are
10:46five-ish years old since they came out and probably seven, eight, nine since they were
10:55designed. And this means it does start to show its age partially in a good way. So for example,
11:01the good thing about it is it's still got a lot of physical buttons for the AC and for whatever
11:07drive
11:07select, thank you. I don't have to change drive mode by clicking on the screen. I can just press a
11:14button
11:14like in a normal car. I like that the AC isn't automated like in a BMW. In a BMW, you
11:20get in and
11:22the seat heaters are up. The steering wheel heating is on or off and you don't know how to
11:30turn off the automation. This one doesn't have the automation and I like that.
11:35What I like less is that there is, I mean, this was designed back at probably iPhone 11 or smaller.
11:47So there isn't really a safe place to put away the phone when you're not charging it. And if you're
11:52charging it, it's down in this tiny armrest. By the way, there is a USB cable plugged in here.
12:00I'll tell you why in a moment. There is no way to let this USB cable out in a good
12:06way, in an easy
12:07way. So you have to kind of like squeeze it with the with the armrest lid. Now, the storage is
12:14so
12:14small that in order to charge a phone, you kind of slide it in like this and it goes partially
12:20under
12:20the cup holders. Also, while it will charge in there, it will also heat up.
12:29There should be some sort of ventilation in there for when it's charging. But as far as I can tell,
12:37either there isn't any or it's inefficient. And so is the charging, by the way, when I'm using Android
12:46auto, it barely maintains charge. So it heats up and barely charges. But it is what it is.
12:56There's a lot of piano black and I'm not a fan of that. I'm not a fan of those haptic
13:01buttons on the
13:02steering wheel. But from what I saw from other Audi models that I've seen on the track, this is
13:06what Audi does these days. There is decent sized glove box, the seats are very comfortable. Visibility
13:14is very good here. The A pillars are surprisingly thin or at a very
13:24advantageous angle, at least for me, so I can see everything here. Rear visibility is
13:30like in a coupe. Good leg room in the back. I'm 175 centimeters tall. Headroom, not very good.
13:40And it turned off because I was stopped for too long. But that's all right. There is a frunk,
13:47which you open with a button on the passenger side doors. There are two charging ports. One is type A,
13:57AC, sorry, AC only, type two. The other one is type two and the CCS as well, if you need
14:04to charge
14:04the one on the passenger on the passenger side in a left hand drive car. In the trunk or the
14:11boot,
14:11there is some sort of storage under the floor and the flap is secured on a string, which is
14:16a bit strange, but it is, it is what it is. So yeah, this is my quick rough and dirty
14:26description of the
14:28Audi e-tron GT. I had 48 hours with it. So this is not a full review. It's early in
14:34the morning. It's
14:35dark ish. So no, all of these fancy drive by shots I do every day, but I hope you will
14:43accept this sort of
14:45format once in a while. Thanks for watching. Tell me what do you think about the auto Audi s,
14:52e-tron GT or e-tron GT s, whichever. Maybe you have a car like this, maybe you have a
15:00Taycan,
15:00maybe you bought a Taycan, which lost a lot of its value. Let me know in the comment section below.
15:09Oh, and by the way, this car costs 150,000 euro starts at that's quite steep for a car electric
15:18car, which
15:20is decent.
15:23If you like my sarcastic down to earth and possibly mildly amusing car reviews, join me every Friday at
15:303pm central European time. And don't forget to subscribe and like this video as it helps me
15:36with the YouTube algorithm. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.