First Drive Review
Does driving a hybrid change a person? We’d rather leave that question unanswered, but driving a hybrid does change your driving style. All of a sudden, even the leadfeet around here shift their attention to the energy flow charts blinking in the instrument cluster, we don’t plot to pass every car in sight, and we make real attempts to maximize fuel economy and battery recharging. Well, at least for a few minutes.
So it was with this A6, with which Audi is returning to the world of hybridized cars. This writer remembers the presentation of the A4 Avant–based Duo in Berlin some 15 years ago. The diesel/electric A4 Duo hybrid worked well enough, but it lagged far behind Audi’s nonhybrid offerings in overall goodness, and that conspired with a high price to kill it off rather quickly. Expect Audi hybrids to stick around much longer now, though, as the company developed its current gasoline/electric system to work across several vehicle lines. What’s in the A6 is the same powertrain that is offered in the European Q5 hybrid—we’ll get a diesel version of the crossover in lieu of that one—and the forthcoming A8 hybrid’s version of the system won’t vary by much.
Improvements Rather than Breakthroughs
The A6 hybrid comes as a sedan only, since markets that favor hybrids and those that favor station wagons seem to be mutually exclusive. The car we drove was European spec, but the hybrid will indeed be offered in the U.S. It will differ only slightly once it goes on sale here in 2012. The powertrain is the same on either continent: a 211-hp, 2.0-liter turbo four-cylinder mated with a 54-hp electric motor. The combined system output is 245 hp. Compared with other hybrid models on the market, the A6 hybrid doesn’t provide major breakthroughs. Its all-electric range is a minimal 1.9 miles at city speeds, but the car can get to 62 mph on battery power alone before the internal-combustion engine kicks in if you treat the accelerator (very) gently. The A6 hybrid feels neither quick nor particularly slow. Audi predicts a run to 60 mph in just over seven seconds, and we figure that’s about right. Audi claims a top speed of 148 mph.
Power is routed exclusively to the front wheels through an eight-speed automatic. The automatic’s torque converter is replaced by an electric motor, however, and coupling and decoupling of the engine from the drivetrain are mostly—but not always—smooth affairs. The four-banger is audible, but effective sound insulation keeps the noise down. There is no tachometer; it’s been replaced by a "power meter" that shows how much precious electricity you’re discharging (or recouping). As with other hybrids, the batteries—a lithium-ion pack with a capacity of 1.3 kilowatt-hours and a weight of 81 pounds—recharge when you lift off the accelerator and when you lightly apply the brakes, at which point the car uses the electric motor as a generator and to slow the car. The hydraulic braking system is activated only during heavy braking. We found the feel of the regenerative braking to be highly artificial and difficult to modulate. Even when you touch the brake pedal gently, the braking force is relatively strong and appears suddenly, a characteristic we thought had finally been banished from hybriddom.
Of course, efficiency is the point of this car, and the Audi A6 hybrid is rated to return 37 mpg combined in the optimistic European test cycle. We even managed to get very close to that figure—according to the car’s readout—in real-world conditions, which, we will admit, made us feel like a better person. For a little while, anyway. Then we decided to flog the car like we would a regular A6, at which point we managed to almost halve the car’s indicated mileage.
The A6 hybrid is considerably heavier than the regular A6—about 200 pounds beefier by our estimation. That weight does make it clumsier than a nonhybrid four-cylinder A6. Although the steering is light and precise, the damping is rather soft, and the tires begin to squeal early. It doesn’t take that much to reach the limits of adhesion in this A6, and the contrast between the A6 hybrid and, say, a conventionally powered A6 with Quattro all-wheel drive is severe. In true hybrid fashion, this Audi doesn’t like to dance. We do, and no matter how many hybrids we drive, that’s never going to change.
