What’s in a name? Quite a lot if you’re Audi. Look at quattro, for example. First of all, the quattro was a car, and a very good one. An iconic one. So iconic it came to define Audi and lots of people wanted one. But to monetise it properly, it had to become a brand applied to lots of Audis, not just one. A marketing tool in other words - and, as a marketing tool, it was a very good one. Everyone – even people who know nothing about cars – knows that, for some reason or another, an Audi with quattro on the back is better.
Now apply that same philosophy to E-tron. This story began differently but is now following a similar path. Unlike quattro, E-Tron wasn’t one special car to start with. It was bit-part brand for some hybrids that few people bought. But when the politicians and Elon Musk decided that consuming millions of electric cars was going to save the world, Audi decided to get in on the act and use the E-tron name to launch its first all-electric car. So it made a big, heavy, electric SUV and called it the E-tron.
Since then, Audi, like the politicians and Elon Musk, has decided that building one big, heavy SUV isn’t going to be enough to save the world. The best way to do that is by everyone consuming lots and lots and lots of electric cars, most of which will no doubt be big, heavy SUVs. And to facilitate this, E-tron has reverted back to being a brand rather than a car. In the same manner as quattro, the hope is that everyone will know – even those who know nothing about cars – that if an Audi has E-tron on the back it is electric and, for some reason or another, it will be saving the world.
So, the E-tron has become the Audi Q8 E-tron. Or, if you really want to do your bit to save the world, you can spend even more money and buy a faster one called the SQ8 E-tron. This replaces the E-tron S and has an even bigger lithium- and cobalt-rich battery. These aren’t the only name changes, though. Q8 no longer means a coupe or Sportback, as it used to. The new Q8 and SQ8 E-trons come in both standard SUV and Sportback bodies. Like the 8 in A8, the 8 in Q8 now means, simply, the pinnacle of the range.
Does all that make sense? Hopefully. The good news is that the rest of the changes for the Q8 and SQ8 E-tron amount to nothing more than a mild facelift. Much of this is dealing with the customer feedback Audi received on the old the E-tron. While everyone who bought one was no doubt extremely happy with how it’s helped save the world, it seems they wished it could’ve also been a bit sharper to drive and have a longer range. And the old car’s range was pretty poor, to be fair.
Audi has listened and acted. The battery has been given more capacity (106kWh for the SQ8) by packing even more cells into the same given space. This makes the battery 24kg heavier, but that’s been offset slightly by swapping from the old car’s aluminium battery under shield to a glass fibre one that’s 7kg lighter. The software that runs the cells has also been improved and the electric motors are more efficient. In the case of the SQ8 E-tron, that’s one 169hp motor at the front and two 133hp motors at the rear. For reasons I don’t fully understand, that adds up to 503hp of system power.
Another part of the improved range is the SQ8 E-tron’s slipperier aerodynamics. There are air curtains that move air around the wheels, spats in front of the wheels to stop turbulence building there, and active flaps in the nose that only open when cooling is required. It amounts to a drop in Cd from 0.28 to 0.27 (0.26 to 0.24 for the Sportback). All of these incremental improvements up the SQ8 E-tron’s range to 284 miles (295 for the Sportback). Still not class-leading, but better. And it charges quicker now – at up to 170kW. That’s not class-leading, either, but it’s also better and means a 10-80 per cent top-up can be done in 31 minutes.
To make it drive a bit better, the engineers have done a few more incremental tweaks. Some are mechanical and some are software related. The mechanical changes include stiffer front control arm bushes and a revised steering ratio, while the software changes include retuned air suspension and ESC. The SQ8 also has 20 mm wider tracks compared to the standard Q8 E-tron and, thanks to its twin rear motors, torque vectoring. The engineers told me that now the SQ8 turns in more sharply, feels more connected around the straight ahead, has less lateral movement – or head toss – and with its torque-vectoring and freer ESP, it’s altogether more engaging to drive.
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t feeling my best when I got behind the wheel of the SQ8 E-tron. That morning I’d woken up at an ungodly hour to catch a flight to Lanzarote and, having not slept very well either, I was tired and had a thumping headache. And after a few kilometres in the SQ8, I was about to give it a thumping, too.
It's been a long, long time since I'd driven the old E-tron, and I don’t remember ever driving the old E-tron S, so making direct comparisons between the steering set-ups of old and new are beyond me. But after my first stretch of motorway driving, I’d already established that the SQ8 E-tron still has some issues with on-centre steering feel. If you look down for a moment to change a setting in the infotainment menus – and there are two screens and lots of menus, remember, so this is not an uncommon experience – the vagaries that remain in the helm mean there’s a good chance that, when you look up again, you’ll have wandered out of your lane.
Thank God for the wonder of lane assist, I hear you cry. Or not, because the lane assist is not infallible. There are times when it forgets to do anything if the car’s wandering beyond the white lines, while at other times it decides to intervene even when you’re well within them. As a result, you tend to switch it off.
I wished you could switch off the induction whine from the motor as easily. This was a feature of early E-trons, and it’s back in the SQ8. It’s by far the loudest induction whine I’ve heard in any electric car, made even more annoying because it peaks at around 30mph. You don’t need me to point out that that’s a very common speed, so it’s there a lot. And it’s a shame, I thought, because the rest of the noise isolation – wind, road, suspension – is truly excellent, so it really highlights the issue.
But in terms of annoying, nothing beats having cameras instead of door mirrors. Somehow, I’ve avoided driving a car with screens for door mirrors until now. Of all the stupid things I’ve seen on modern cars - and there have been many - this is the winner. There’s nothing wrong with door mirrors. They work just fine; always have done. Cameras and screens do not. For a start the screens are tiny, so it’s really hard to see anything. When the sun shines on them you can see even less. And if the camera lens gets a speck of dirt or a droplet of water on it, you cannot see anything at all. Even when you can see something, they give you little idea of distance or the speed of approaching vehicles, and they’re completely useless for reversing. If, like me, you use your door mirrors as part of your visual toolbox when backing up, you’ve just lost two of the most important utensils. Whoever thought up this idiotic idea should have to live in a house with tiny LCD screens instead of windows. That seems to me the same sort of needless use of technology and would be a fitting punishment.
Having been told the head toss, like the steering, was one of the key upgrades on this new model, I was looking out for an improvement there, too. But as I was driving through town with the motor whine ringing in my ears, or veering unwittingly in and out of lanes on the motorway, while every now and again bouncing off a car I hadn’t spotted next to me, I was very aware that my head was bobbing about. This would’ve been annoying at the best of times, but when you have a headache, it’s like Lanzarote’s volcanic past coming to life again in your brain. At this point I stopped to make some notes about the SQ8, and the words I chose to describe the ride included lumpen, trapped and fidgety.
You know that saying, what a difference a day makes? Well, luckily, this was a two-day launch and the second day was a lot better. I had slept the night before, so I wasn’t tired anymore and my headache had gone. And when I climbed back into the SQ8, for what I thought would be more of the same, I had a very different experience. Not completely different, because the mirrors were still terrible, the whine was still there, and the lane assist was still a mix of intrusive and missing in action, but I seemed to have dialled into the steering and the ride was much better. So much better that I started to question my sanity.
I thought I was in the same SQ8 that I’d been in the day before and decided my tiredness and headache must have exacerbated the ride issues. But the day before my head was actually moving around in the car, even over the smoother surfaces, while today it wasn’t. It was mostly still. I was so perplexed that I checked the registration number, and it turned out that I was in a different car. So I tried all the different suspension modes – Comfort, Auto and Dynamic – to see if any of those replicated yesterday’s experience, but none did. Dynamic made it a bit too firm, that’s all, while Auto was the best. It was supple around town and settled on the motorway, and because I was doing more than 30mph so the whine had gone, the combination of the ride and the deathly silence made the cruising experience really rather superb.
This acted as some sort of panacea, because after a while I started to enjoy lots more about SQ8. Take the handling, for instance. Now, it’s not fun, fun, but it’s relatively fun – fun for a big, heavy SUV. There were a few winding sections of road, and through these the body lean was minimal and the springing and damping kept the car very stable. Again, it’s best to leave it in Auto mode, which retains enough give to deal with bumps when the car’s loaded up through a bend. Dynamic, because it’s a bit too stiff, causes the SQ8 to skip a little.
The steering works best in Comfort, though (you can mix and match the settings in Individual mode). It’s the lightest setting and takes away some of the unnatural weight that gets thrown at you in the other modes. Even then the steering isn’t great, mind. Along with the dead spot just off-centre, there’s an overenthusiastic ramp up in speed at around a quarter turn, but it’s not so bad that it ruins the car’s flow along a decent road. It’s a similar story with the brakes. They don’t feel completely natural, either, but they’re not bad like a Ford Mustang Mach E’s. You can still modulate them effectively, even if the pedal becomes quite solid and wooden after some initial progression.
By now I was feeling a lot more enthusiastic about the SQ8. So much so that I’d turned off the traction control and did a couple of laps of a large, empty roundabout. From this, I concluded that it has a lot of grip, and that it’s the front that goes first. No surprise there, then. But you might be surprised to learn that if you back off, it nips the understeer in the bud quickly, and if you boot it, the SQ8 E-tron oversteers in a calm and controlled way. Do you know what? I was actually starting to enjoy myself.
It’s also quick, which I suppose is something else that won’t come as a total shock. It’s sensible quick, though, not Tesla-stupid quick – the kind that has no purpose outside of motorsport and just makes your eyes go blurry. The SQ8 starts with the usual punch off the line, and up to around 60mph is as fast as most sports cars. After that, the rate of acceleration begins to drop off, so it won’t be winning any autobahn drag races, but it’ll do the job on our speed-limited motorways very well.
When I got back to base I had a chat to one of the engineers. I explained that yesterday’s car felt very different, but today – either because of my mood, the car, or both – I was a lot more impressed. He said that in the SQ8 there really shouldn’t be any head toss, so he’d have a look at the car I was in the day before to find out what was going on there. But he agreed that, while the steering is improved, there is still some work needed to sharpen it up even more.
That’s why I like talking to engineers. You can often have a sensible, honest conversation with them and learn a thing or two at the same time. One of the things I learned concerned the motor whine. He was aware of that, too, but has already devised a solution. The launch cars were pre-production models, and they were set up to drive using mostly use the front motor at slow speeds on a light accelerator. But all production cars have a software update that switches drive to the rear motors in that scenario, which are better isolated and not as noisy, so he assured me that the whine has waned.
So what started off as a less than enthusiastic launch turned out to be a far more positive one, which is good. It’s much more enriching to speak favourably of a car than slate it, so I was very happy to have left with a largely positive experience in SQ8 E-tron. Realistically, it’s still not the greatest electric car because it’s beaten on range and charging speed, which is what counts for a lot of people. But it’s a good car. It’s quick, quiet, comfortable and roomy – front and back with a good-sized boot as well. Moreover, it gives me hope. Hope that electric cars are getting more enjoyable to drive, because if Audi can make a big lump of SUV handle with a decent degree of dynamism, then we’re moving in the right direction.
Whether or not that direction has much to do with saving the planet, is probably beside the point as far as its maker is concerned. Cars like the SQ8 E-tron are first and foremost about feeding the first world's insatiable consumerism, which is going to continue indulging itself with the rampant building of big, heavy SUVs for the foreseeable future - no matter the power source. Consequently, Audi, like every volume carmaker charting a course to wholesale electrification, has concerned itself with clever branding for very good reason, and the latest Q8 is merely a preview of its wider ambitions for the E-tron badge. Clearly, the underlying merits of that strategy remain questionable and open to decade-long debate - but for now, the manufacturer will likely be satisfied with the verdict that its newest flagship EV manages to be a shrewd bit of marketing and a fundamentally good car all at the same time.
Specification | 2023 Audi SQ8 E-tron Black Edition
Engine: One front electric motor, dual rear motors
Transmission: single-speed auto, four-wheel drive
Power (hp): 503
Torque (lb ft): 718
0-62mph: 4.5 seconds
Top speed: 130mph
Weight: 2,650kg
Energy consumption: 2.52 miles/ kWh (WLTP)
Range: 284 miles
Price: £97,500
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