2019 Audi E-Tron SUV's battery is 1,500 pounds of Xanax
Cars
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I don't even have a rated mileage range on E-tron SUV yet, but I can already tell you the most interesting technical aspect of this vehicle, to me, is its battery design and its very innovative energy conservation tricks.
Now, in a conventional car, everything is dictated by what lives under the hood.
In this vehicle, just about everything is dictated by what's bolted under the belly.
Today's Audis their heart, or technological heart of the Audi is the engine, so it's in the front.
This engine, the position dictates the whole architecture of the car.
The Audi each one changes because they're hard.
[UNKNOWN] is a battery pack located in the floors of the car.
This changed everything.
This is the new engine of the electric era which is a little counter intuitive.
What Audi has done here with the new Etron SUV engine is to arrange the batteries, and 95 kilowatt hours worth into 36 roughly shoe box size modules like you see right here.
Cooling them is what's hard when you're in a high-performance vehicle.
So what they do is they drop these into a well that has a conductive gel, that's that white material you see down there.
That conducts heat down into the sort of aluminum space frame beneath which is a giant heat sink.
In the liquid cooling system it flows from one side of the battery pack to the other, from the driver's side over to the passenger side, and then on to cooler liquid.
All of this is surrounded by a very strong structural frame.
In fact you can see up here these massive bolting points, there are 35 of these.
They bolt this thing up underneath the car.
It is a substantial structural member.
It needs to be.
It weighs 1,500 pounds Now of course the [UNKNOWN] SUV is an all wheel drive.
These are the folks that bought you Quattro, of course.
But it's typically a rear wheel drive.
The larger motor in the rear does most of your everyday driving.
When the performance or conditions get so demanding, then you'll have the front motor kick in and then you got your front wheels helping as well.
Zero to 60 happens in about 5.5 seconds, but more interesting even than how this gets power to the road It's how it conserves power.
Now of course you got different levels of regeneration, controlled intuitively by simple clicks on the paddle.
What used to be your transmission shifters back in the day, you can click to one or more aggressive levels the most aggressive is so sticky it gives you this so called one pedal driving.
Audi says that up to 90% of your braking is gonna be handled by regen, especially with that very aggressive mode, almost never getting on the pads.
They say braking up to 0.3 Gs is handled by the motors, not by the friction pads.
And by the way, you'll also get some prompts on that amazing virtual cockpit that's gonna give you some indications of when to lift off by driving, not just while braking.
The idea being that navigation route information Camera data and radar sensing can give this can an idea when you should lift off a little to still get where you're going in the manner that you're going both using less energy.
All in, Audi assumes that their regeneration technology, and the efficiency of their battery, especially its cooling.
Is gonna allow regent to account for 30% of its total range Whatever that turns out to be.
Now that all dealing with you on the road, when you are actually off road and charging that really gets interesting as well and our first ever auto industry that we're working with Amazon.
Amazon home service division that you normally call to do project at your house now they will be able give you basically one click to buy and install a level two charger in your home.
To power this guy up.
Now the nice thing about it is most people can kind of dread electric vehicles, saying once I get one I gotta start calling electricians, who never call me back, and give me a price that I don't even know if it's good or not!
Amazon will handle all the pricing and scheduling, and yes, customer reviews in there as well.
And when you're out on the road looking for a charge out, he's got a new partnership with a company called Electrify America, which promises to have nearly 500 Stations, with many more than that charging positions on the road, where this car can be charge, as well as other stations.
But the key is, you'll get 1,000 kilowatt hours of free charging in the first four years at the Electrify America's spots.
That's about 11 charges.
It's not a huge number, but it's a good amount of volts on the house.
By the way, Electrify America's got an interesting story.
It was created out of $2 billion of the VW Emissions Fund as part of their settlement with the government, so you're already getting some dividends paying back here.
The 2019 Audi e-tron SUV is opening a new page for Audi, their first all-electric production vehicle, and they've opened the books for pre-orders.
It's 1,000 bucks Fully refundable.
They'll use that not just to let you get in line, but also to gauge interest in terms of how much there is, and geographically where there is.
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