As advertised, I finally caved to reality and replaced my beloved Alfa Romeo Giulia with a wagon suitable for hauling my inconveniently large family.

Audi S6 Avant e-tron from the front

That is the new Audi S6 Avant e-tron, a full-EV station wagon capable of hitting 100 km/h in less than three seconds, or driving for over 500km on a full charge — but not both.

I didn’t go straight for the full-fat S6, in my defence (there is no RS6 e-tron, yet): I was looking at the A6, but once you add dual motors (for four-wheel-drive) and a couple of other options, the prices start to get awfully close. Some man-maths later, and I had convinced myself that it was a bargain really…

Let’s get the EV stuff out of the way first. With 500 real-world km of driving, range anxiety is not much of a factor. Especially on the open road, the car pulls all sorts of tricks with aero and its own power train to eke out maximum range. Once you do need to recharge, if you plug it in to a high-power charger, it can take a full charge in about quarter of an hour, which honestly is no great hardship. If you’re on a family road trip, you’ll probably need to make a coffee/bathroom/stretch stop about that long anyway before you run out of range, and the built-in navigation system will help you plan your stop around availability of high-speed chargers and your desired charge level upon arrival. It will even recalculate your charging stops in real time based on the actual performance you are getting and availability at chargers along the route, which is nice.

For home use, I got an industrial socket put into my garage — and as soon as I plugged the car in, it tripped the breaker… Luckily, the charger has a mode to limit its draw, and I don’t expect this to be quite as much of a problem for overnight charging, when fewer appliances are running. Obviously, this is not fifteen-minute charging, but by definition, if the car is going in the garage to charge, it’s staying for a few hours, probably overnight when watts are cheap, so sipping power slowly is not a deal-breaker. And if I do need to top up in a hurry, a high-power charger just went in at the market across the road.

Audi S6 Avant e-tron from the back

As for the actual driving side of things, this is obviously hardly a Lotus; one of the doors probably weighs more than an S1 Elise. However, I have always been partial to big cars; the first car I bought for myself was an already-ancient Saab 9000 Turbo, and I loved that thing to bits. Audi wagons — Avants, as they call them in Ingolstadt — have always had an aura of cool, somewhat mitigated by a reputation for understeer due to big heavy engines slung way out over the front axle.

Now e-tron Audis of course do not have that particular problem, since all the (considerable) weight of the batteries sits under the floor and between the axles. This means that the thing can actually corner, in a way that those older internal-combustion Audi Avants couldn’t. This is not a given with EVs; for instance, Teslas in my experience just can’t corner to save their lives. Kias can: I quite liked the handling of the EV6 I test-drove, but while that had ample cabin space, it doesn’t have the luggage capacity of the big Audi wagon.

With the chassis and suspension in Performance mode, the S6 will absolutely slingshot around corners, no doubt helped by all that low-down weight keeping it planted. It wallows a little more on its air suspension than my Giulia did, but it’s a different sort of car, with different priorities. I do have a niggling fear that it may eat tyres, but then again, that’s basically the only consumable. Even the brakes hardly get used, since with the regenerative braking in its most aggressive setting, simply backing off the throttle is enough for most situations, even bringing the car to a complete stop. The (substantial) disc brakes are basically there as backup and for emergencies, and meanwhile the batteries get a top-up with every stop.

The S6 definitely nails the big-car brief of wafting effortlessly around town. In Comfort mode, it smothers bumps and potholes, and of course with no vibration or noise from an internal-combustion engine, the cabin is a wonderfully peaceful place to be. A minute flex of the ankle is plenty to keep up with traffic, while the Bang & Olufsen stereo system has incredible audio quality. It’s also amazingly easy to park for a car that is nearly 5 metres long, even on narrow city streets, thanks to cameras basically everywhere. Even its turning circle is pretty good — somewhere else it wins over the Giulia, which had the turning radius of a battleship.

Out of town, it positively lunges into any overtake opportunity. I have kept the audible alert for speeding, because it is just too easy to pile on (quite a lot of) speed without fully noticing. But on the motorway, with the cruise-control set, it just eats miles. After I picked it up, it went straight into its first challenge: a family holiday in Croatia, with lots of motorway miles between here and there, and figuring out the charging that goes along with that too. Everyone was a fan, even after a full day on the road, which was very much not the case with the Giulia.

All of the considerable computing power is well-integrated, including a whole separate screen for the front passenger — or the navigator, I suppose — to let them set up the route, including charging options. The chassis will then set itself up to match the travel plan that has been set, including lowering itself and opening and closing various flaps to optimise aerodynamics. A wagon with active aero is just cool.

Audi S6 Avant e-tron interior

The cabin is a very nice place to spend time. It has a wrap-around display for the driver, encompassing both the instrument cluster and the in-car entertainment. The ICE is all touch, with no physical MMI controller available — although there is an Audi voice assistant, as well as Siri via CarPlay. As expected, the display and the numerous piano-black elements both inside and out are absolute magnets for fingerprints; we shall have to see quite how obsessive I get about that!

The steering wheel is not round, having a flat bottom and top, but in normal use I don’t even notice. The thumb buttons get a plus for being actual buttons, rather than swipe surfaces, but they are the weakest point in the cabin, feeling distinctly plasticky and un-premium. The steering column and front seats are almost infinitely adjustable, and reset themselves every time you get into the car, which is fun.

I specced the sporty seats, and while not quite as figure-hugging as the ones in my Giulia, they are still pretty supportive. I hear that the full-on bucket seats available on the RS6 actually cut down quite a bit on rear leg-room, so they would probably not have been an option anyway. I do find it quite disconcerting that the seat does not stay put: instead, when the driver’s door is opened, the seat moves back and the steering column moves out of the way to make it easier to get in and out. This is all well and good, but sometimes you just want to tell the car “look, I’m just getting out for a moment to open a gate or move some bikes, no need to do the whole song and dance”.

I also sprang for the heads-up display, so I never need to take my eyes off the road: speed, navigation, and other useful information are always there, floating above the road surface. There is no permanent media info displayed in the HUD, but it will briefly flash up the name of a new track when it starts playing, which feels like the right compromise. In the same vein, audible navigation instructions play primarily through speakers in the driver’s head-rest, instead of blaring through the whole cabin.

A minor point: I liked the single button to disable lane departure alerts on my Giulia, and I am glad to see that something similar has made it to Audi. The S6 has active lane-keeping, not just audible alerts, nudging the steering wheel and painting the lane markings in red in the HUD, but it is possible to turn all that off by long-pressing on a button at the end of a stalk, in the same place as it was in my old Giulia. It resets every time I get out of the car, but that’s fine: it’s the sort of feature you probably want on most of the time, and actively turn off when you don’t need it.

Another, even more minor point: Audi finally caught up with other manufacturers in enabling double-clicking the unlock button on the “key” to lower all of the windows. This is a surprisingly big quality-of-life improvement, although for some reason it defaults to off and has to be turned on in the car’s settings.

So, the negatives.

I mentioned the slightly down-market feel of the thumb controls on the steering wheel. The CarPlay implementation also has a perceptible lag to it — nothing like the agonising wait for a response that I see in my wife’s Volkswagen, but still noticeable and annoying.

It took a few tries to get the app working which allows for remote control, which is annoying in summer, when I definitely would have used features like pre-cooling of the cabin before departure.

But in the grand scheme of things, these are all very minor aspects.

Two optional features I did not spec were the virtual wing-mirrors and the full-length glass roof. The A6 loaner I had for a weekend while waiting for the S6 to show up had both of these features, and having experienced them, I am very glad I do not have to live with them!

The virtual wing-mirrors replace the traditional glass mirrors with tiny cameras that feed displays in the doors, roughly where your eyes would fall if you were looking in a traditional mirror. These work fine on the motorway, but fall down badly for parking, especially in a tight garage like mine. Glass mirrors have one key feature that cameras and screens cannot replicate: if I move my head, my point of view in the mirror also shifts. The displays try to replicate this by allowing the view to be repositioned with touch controls, but it’s not even remotely the same thing. I am happy to sacrifice a few percentage points of aero efficiency for more usability and less chance of scraping the side of my car.

As for the roof, I have always specced my own cars with sunroofs, right back to that first Saab. I love the light and air, and was ready to tick the box for the Audi’s glass roof, until I understood a few things. It’s a lovely thing to look at, to be sure, spanning the entire cabin and therefore letting in huge amounts of light — and that is also its Achilles’ heel. Presumably because it is so large, it does not come with physical shades. Instead, the glass itself can be polarised to keep out the sunlight — but that is not at all the same as closing a curtain. Park the car in the sun, and the cabin turns into an oven very quickly, even with the roof fully polarised. The glass roof also has an absolutely terrifying replacement cost, and okay, I have insurance that covers the glass on the car, but because of that cost, I also suspect that Audi would not have a ton of them in stock at any one time. Again, I am quite glad not to have opted for this, as the extra light in the cabin is just not worth the downsides — and the not-inconsiderable cost.

Bottom line: one month in, I am enjoying the EV lifestyle very much indeed. Even one hit of 650 km didn’t phase it, or me. We started on only 40% charge (I didn’t find anywhere to plug it in where we were in Croatia), so we cruised up the coast from near Pula to Koper/Capodistria, and charged up to 100% at a high-performance charger while we all had breakfast. Then we crossed into Italy and stopped for lunch near Vicenza: we still had half a charge at this point, but it was lunch time, and there was a Tesla Supercharger right off the motorway, in a mall with eating options for everyone. Figuring out the Tesla app was a bit of a pain, but eventually fine. Then from there we cruised all the way home in comfort, with nobody complaining of other people’s elbows in their faces, or luggage piled in the footwells. And then I still had enough charge to blast up into the hills to get the Son & Heir to his gig that evening, powering through the corners and devouring the straights, before recovering most of the charge as the car rolled silently back down afterwards. So far, the thing is doing exactly the jobs I bought it for.

It’s on a four-year lease-purchase plan, because I am not sure what the resale value of a four-year-old EV will be, or indeed what the state of the battery will be. At the end of the four years I can buy it out or roll forward into financing for a new model, so we shall see how I feel then.

🖼️  Photos from the Audi product page; the ones I selected look just about exactly like my car.