The RS GT Performance has more than 900 horsepower available and can make quick work of the Autobahn.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
It seems ironic to be driving to the world’s largest engine manufacturing plant in an all-electric car, but these days, that’s just the way it goes.
To be fair, the enormous Audi Hungaria assembly plant in Gyor does make electric motors too, but only for the Audi Q6 and Q8 e-trons and the Porsche Macan. I’m driving the much sportier SQ6 e-tron today, and the sportiest of them all, the e-tron GT RS Performance.
Both are great for making distance on the Autobahn, but then I took the GT on the narrow road to the top of Austria’s Postalm Winterpark, an 1,100-metre-high pass outside Salzburg, and nobody was impressed. The GT was too wide and powerful for making the most of the twisting mountain road, and the many hikers looked on the quarter-million-dollar supercar with semi-curious derision. “But it’s all-electric!” I wanted to call out. “I’m saving the planet!”
I left from Munich, just south of Audi’s home town in Ingolstadt, to visit the Hungarian assembly plant and see for myself how the company has updated its operations there. I’d already recharged once at an Audi-branded EV station in Salzburg, where I swapped the SQ6 SUV for the GT coupe. It was a time-consuming process. Two of the four chargers weren’t working properly, and when I did plug in successfully, the electrons only flowed at a fraction of the car’s potential. The GT should be able to suck back its charge at up to 320 kilowatts but the Audi station, rated for 160 kilowatts, could manage only half of even that. I unplugged before it would start to slow down with its battery 80 per cent full.
The GT proved too wide and powerful for the narrow road to the top of Austria’s Postalm Winterpark.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
“Why so slow?” I asked the Audi reps. They shrugged. They were car people, not electrical eggheads. These days, out on the road, that’s the way it goes.
There were two more stops to make before reaching Vienna, each several hundred kilometres apart along glorious valley roads, and leaving plenty of battery power in reserve to drive on to the Gyor plant. At the first station, with six fast chargers tucked around the isolated back of a supermarket, all six were already in use when I rolled in. It took a half-hour wait before a 125-kilowatt charger became available, made vacant by a Fiat e500 on a much more leisurely schedule than I was. Its driver almost seemed to sneer as he slid slowly away from the Ionity-branded charger. Fortunately, the prefab washroom on the edge of the site accepted credit cards to pay for entry, so I didn’t need to ask the Fiat driver to volunteer a half-euro coin for a pee. Talk about the great equalizer.
“We don’t usually have a problem here, but then we often charge at home,” said a nice couple who’d driven up in a Q6 e-tron just as a Hyundai Ioniq 5 was leaving. “In Austria, there’s always another station not so far away. It costs about half as much to charge it as we’d pay for gas, but it’s a company car, so we don’t really notice.”
The second station, beside the main highway near Vienna, had eight EV chargers, and five of them were not working. Probably six – I couldn’t quite understand the German invectives being hurled at one of the chargers by a recently arrived Citroën driver, but I did follow their general intent and he didn’t look happy. He eyed me while I sat in the Audi and looked keen to claim my charging space before any cheeky Tesla or Renault might pull in. The charger was rated at 360 kilowatts but the car charged at no more than 111 kilowatts, despite the warm evening. When it reached an 80-per-cent charge, after close to an hour, I unplugged and slid slowly away toward the highway. I forgot to sneer.
Aside from waits at the charging stations, and slow charges while I was there, the rest of the European electric experience was wonderful. The big Audis were comfortable, responsive and seemed to rule the road. I sat on cruise control and let the car’s sensors shift its speed to the constantly changing speed limits on the road to Hungary. If I’d get a ticket, it would be the car’s fault, not mine – at least, that’s what I’d try to tell the judge. Forget those forms I’d signed about taking responsibility for the driving.
An Audi SQ6 e-tron charging in Austria.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
Gyor is not far from the Austrian border and is Hungary’s sixth-largest city. The Audi plant is the region’s biggest employer by far, and it’s Hungary’s largest exporter, accounting for 6 per cent of total exports. The country is wooing foreign governments – read, China – to become a global EV battery-making hub, so the plant might not account for as large a proportion of Hungary’s exports in coming years, but for now, the 30-year-old facility at Gyor is a behemoth. It built more than 177,000 Audi Q3s and Q3 Sportbacks last year, as well as more than 1.5 million gas and diesel engines. As well as all those, it built another 114,000 electric axle drive units.
There’s more, of course, but the thing that stuck with me is that the entire 5.1-million-square-metre site is carbon-neutral, and has been since 2020. It takes much of its power from the near-boiling water found in subterranean reservoirs more than two kilometres beneath the city, which is pumped to the surface for conversion of its heat and then returned to deep under the earth. As if that’s not enough, the solar panels that cover 160,000 square metres of roofing make up the largest rooftop solar park in Europe. And the grounds are home to more than a quarter-million bees in six distinct families, living in digitally monitored beehives that feed billions of points of data about their lives and habits back to researchers, as part of Audi’s “we4bee” initiative.
Inside the Audi Hungaria assembly plant in Gyor, which is the world’s largest engine manufacturing plant and also makes electric motors. Since 2020, the massive plant has been carbon-neutral.Courtesy of manufacturer
All this helped to clear my environmental conscience on the highway back to Vienna, which would soon be decimated by my flight home to Toronto. For a while, though, sitting in traffic with the car doing most of the steering and throttle control, all seemed right with the world.
A diesel truck pulled alongside and I looked out at its gigantic wheels, their rims as tall as my roof. “I’m saving the planet,” I mouthed at nobody in particular, and for just that moment, I almost believed it.
The writer was a guest of the automaker. Content was not subject to approval.