New Fuel, Newly Familiar

With the e-tron, Audi bets that the electric future won’t feel all that different from today.

- Eric Tingwall

EVEN THE OIL-SOAKED MIDDLE EAST can’t avoid the clean-energy future. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), smaller than Maine and sitting atop 6 percent of the world’s oil reserves, currently produces 98 percent of its energy with fossil fuels. It is also in the midst of building the world’s largest solar power plant. The Emiratis know a day will come when their near-bottomless oil will be as useful as a basement full of AOL free-hours floppy disks.

This creates a fitting parallel with the SUV we’re driving here, Audi’s first mass-produced electric vehicle, the 2019 e-tron. Audi’s parent, the Volkswagen Group, is the world’s largest automaker and virtually all 10 million passenger vehicles it sold in 2017 are powered by fossil fuels. A costly, low-volume EV program like this won’t improve the bottom line anytime soon. But just as the Stone Age didn’t end because humans ran out of stones, the oil-powered economy will run dry before the wells do. The Audi e-tron is a hedge, a bet, a prediction of what comes next.