QUIET COMFORT

Who said EVs are one-trick ponies? The Audi e-tron is a refreshing take on the genre!

- AATISH MISHRA

THERE’S TWO WAYS AN ELECTRIC CAR CAN GO. One is the mentally fast route, that forced our otherwise eloquent Editor to resort to using abbreviated profanities in his story elsewhere in this magazine. The other is this. Passing up the need to cause internal haemorrhaging to focus on the other thing that EVs do really well. Silence. Yes, I know all EVs are silent, stop coming at me with your pitchforks. What I mean is, not all of them choose to build their entire experience around the silence and the experience it can deliver. In the Audi e-tron, you won’t be inviting your buddies to blow their minds when you put your foot down. Instead, your buddies will be queuing up for some alone time in the bubble of tranquility that its cabin is.

Okay, it’s not completely silent. It makes a hum. A whine. Think Iron Man’s suit charging up its repulsers for an attack. That sound is essentially a pedestrian warning system that alerts people that this 2.5 tonne SUV is creeping about in the vicinity. But it’s unlike anything you’d hear on a regular car. It’s otherworldly. You feel like The Jetsons in one of their space cars. But that’s just at rolling speeds, and if you have the windows rolled down. Roll ’em up and get going in the e-tron and you’re enveloped in a deep hush.