Miko Marczyk with a Guinness World Records adjudicator and the Audi A6 Sportback e-tron. The board, in Polish, gives the distance driven on a single charge as 1,338 km. Credit: Audi The reigning European Rally Champion drove an Audi A6 Sportback e-tron 1,338 kilometres across Poland on a single charge, a Guinness World Record, at 7.09 kWh per 100 kilometres. The car’s official WLTP range is 777 kilometres, and the drive took more than 45 hours, which puts the average speed under 30 kilometres an hour.
Miko Marczyk drove an Audi A6 Sportback e-tron 1,338 kilometres across Poland on a single charge, setting a Guinness World Record, Audi said. The car averaged 7.09 kWh per 100 kilometres. The drive took more than 45 hours. The official figure is 777.
Audi rates the car at 777 kilometres on the WLTP cycle, so the record sits 72% beyond it. The previous holder, a Lucid Air Grand Touring, covered 1,205 kilometres from St Moritz to Munich in July last year. That car is rated at 960 kilometres, so it beat its own figure by about a quarter. Speed explains most of the difference.
Audi did not publish an average speed, as InsideEVs noted. The distance and the duration give one anyway, at under 30 kilometres an hour sustained for nearly two days. Marczyk set off at 1.55am on 11 September and drove the Vistula route to Hel on the Baltic and back, through Krakow and Warsaw, in ordinary traffic. The car itself is standard.
It makes 367 hp, reaches 100 kilometres an hour in 5.4 seconds and carries 94.9 kWh usable from a 100 kWh pack. Its drag coefficient of 0.21 is the lowest of any Audi ever built. The company says aerodynamic drag accounts for about 40% of the Sportback’s consumption on the WLTP cycle. The platform is getting familiar.
The A6 e-tron is the second car on Premium Platform Electric, the 800-volt architecture Porsche and Audi built inside Volkswagen Group. Porsche’s Cayenne Electric runs on it, and so does Bentley’s new Torcal. Regenerative braking handles about 95% of everyday braking events here, at up to 220 kW. Efficiency is Audi’s current argument.
The company is making the same case at the cheap end, where the A2 e-tron built in Ingolstadt claims 12.8 kWh per 100 kilometres and 646 kilometres on WLTP. That car misses a European category for small cars by 12 centimetres. The test is the weak point. WLTP replaced the older NEDC cycle for all new European cars in September 2018 and is run in a laboratory to a fixed speed profile.
It exists so buyers can compare one car against another, not to predict what any of them will do. A rally driver has just beaten it by 72% by driving at walking pace for two days.
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