Hello
No half measures with the latest version of Audi’s big electric SUV.
Audi SQ8 e-Tron Black Edition
Month 1
The story so far
Audi’s revamped flagship electric SUV
+ Refined but rorty drive
- But it doesn’t go far on a charge
Logbook
Price £103,310
Performance 106kWh battery, three motors, 496bhp, 4.5sec 0-62mph, 130mp
Efficiency 2.2 miles per kWh (official), 1.5 miles per kWh (tested), 0g/km CO2
Range 269 miles (official), 159 miles (tested)
Energy cost 7.0p per mile
Miles this month 861
Total miles 861
Nothing is more likely to get a reader swiping left than a big electric SUV from play-it-safe Audi. But you’d be wrong, dear readers: the following months are going to be box office. Pretty much everything about this SQ8 e-Tron (formerly known as the e-Tron S) is extreme: extremely good or infuriatingly bad. Let me explain.
The e-Tron was Audi’s first EV, launched in 2019, and the 2020 S version packed a big 95kWh battery and a puny 223- mile range. Audi has subsequently re-engineered the car’s battery, chassis and looks, and stuck on the Q8 badge to telegraph things have changed.
The battery in the base £69,285 Q8 e-Tron 50 has jumped to 89kWh from the original e-Tron’s 64.7kWh, because its sub-200-mile real-world range was insufficient.
The WLTP-ratified range is now 305 miles. Also, Audi has boosted its DC public charging capability to 150kW.
Another £10k upgrades you to the 55 model, with an extra 50kW (67bhp) across its twin motors, 170kW max charging and a colossal 106kWh battery.
The same powerpack feeds the flagship SQ8 (from £97,385). This Black Edition’s official WLTP range is 269 miles, which looks a little undernourished when the four-wheel-drive Kia EV9 offers 313 miles and a Tesla Model Y Long Range 331. More miles from smaller batteries requiring less resources.
The SQ8’s bigger battery takes up the same space but yields more energy density thanks to revised chemistry and prismatic batteries, which replace less space-efficient pouch-shaped cells. A new battery management system with indirect cooling aims to keep the cells at the optimum temperature to sustain range and fast charging. While 170kW doesn’t look that impressive a DC figure, Audi reckons the SQ8 can sustain a good refuelling curve – we’ll see.
The good news is that the SQ8 can get impressively close to its official consumption figure on motorway cruises. The bad news is that figure is a deeply unimpressive 2.2 miles per kWh, way off the 3.5 miles you can now expect from an efficient electric car. The SQ8 is hampered by its stature: it weighs 2650kg unladen and measures almost five metres long with a height similar to an Audi Q5’s.
