SaSi
Seriously Illogical
Well, after 21 years of owning my current car, an Audi S3, I went and got myself a new one. Influenced by family and friends, I opted for a PHEV rather than a 4WD petrol engine, so my new car is an Audi Q3 TFSIe plug in hybrid.
It's a brand new car and sold as a premium one, so of course everything works smoothly and it's full with gadgets and electronics - more of which later on.
It's my first experience in my 35 years of driving with an automatic transmission and that took all of 20 minutes to get used to - much less than I expected. And I liked it. And I like it even more by the day. One of the biggest "upgrades" in the new car and not one I had in my mental list.
So, leaving aside all the "irrelevant" stuff, let's focus on the electric driving experience. In short, I like it. The petrol engine doesn't make a loud noise or vibrations but you can hear it when it's pushed. The electric motor of just 115HP has so much torque that acceleration from a stop is similar or perhaps better than the S3 - save for uphill starting where the front wheel drive shows it's limitations. Perhaps 245HP on the front axle is too much.
My daily driving needs call for 45km to work and back including the usual detours for grocery shopping and the car gives an advertised 45-55km electric range. After the first full charge it showed 53km and that keeps coming down daily and seems to settle around 49km so far. In reality it realizes 44-46km in the 5 days I've driven it to work and back, which is plenty for my daily needs.
Driving is fine and the switchover from electric to ICE is not noticeable in the few times it occurred. Actually it's hard to convince the car to switch to ICE. Especially on a full battery. It does turn on the ICE when pushed but I don't want to push it hard until after the first 1000km or so to allow the engine to break in. And it's hard to run the engine to make these 1000km when it just will go electric, so I decided to stop recharging at night until I have done some mileage.
Recharging - for me - is straightforward. I'm parking inside and I had already installed a 20A/240V outlet by the parking space when the house was built 10 years ago. The "compact e-tron" charger that comes with the car just plugs on the wall and the car. Charges at 2.4kW (I believe) and it takes it 5.5hours to charge the 14kWh battery. There's also a 11kW cable for public chargers but I can't see myself looking for a public AC charger and then wait for a couple of hours for the car to charge.
What is very useful is that the car has a scheduler function for charging. I set it up to charge between midnight and 7:00am with a departure time of 8:00am. It will start charging during off-peak hours when electricity is much cheaper. It will even (it's an option) turn on the auxiliary air-conditioning unit to set the inside temperature to whatever is selected by the controls in preparation for departure. Not critical for me as it's parked inside but in the heatwave we are currently in, that inside temperature reaches 29 degrees C so it's nice to find the car ready at 22C.
Since my daily driving routines are covered by the battery capacity, driving to work and back is mostly electric. But that's not the way hybrids are supposed to be driven. They are to be considered a dual fuel - dual engine vehicles with the possibility to combine the power outputs and also recuperate energy during braking. I'm thinking of the scenario to leave home fully charged, drive EV in the neighborhood, hybrid on the motor way and EV when looking for a place to park. But that's for longer journeys. For daily use, electricity is about 4,5x cheaper than gasoline here so daily driving EV makes more sense financially.
Even though the car doesn't have explicit "recuperation control", I've discovered - but not seen it in the manual - that choosing shifting mode and drive mode sets recuperation mode as well. It's an automatic transmission but it's a Tip Tronic one. Which means it can run in fully auto with two modes (Drive and Sport) and also manual mode. The cool thing is that even if switched to manual, it won't stick to the wrong gear but revert to auto changing if the driver forgets to focus on shifting gears. I will probably never use manual mode.
Choosing the "D" mode, combined with "Auto" or "Comfort" drive mode gives a high priority to EV and when you release the accelerator it just rolls. Recuperation is achieved by pressing the brake, the more you press, the more it recuperates. The actual brakes engage much later on, during hard braking. It appears that recuperation alone slows down the car effectively.
Choosing the "S" mode, gives the ICE a chance and it will engage whenever power output requested exceeds something between 25 and 50%. And in this mode, when you release the accelerator, it immediately starts to recuperate hard to the point you rarely need to brake. It looks like it slows down much faster when there are vehicles in the front compared to just releasing the accelerator on an empty road. In slow traffic, when you need to stop and go all the time, EV is always engaged. The ICE seems to kick in when speed is above a threshold. And the automatic gearbox chooses the optimum gear to set the engine speed to about 2.000-2.500rpm, so 6th gear is reached pretty fast.
The virtual cockpit dashboard has an option to show engine speed or a power meter. With automatic transmission, the power meter is more useful as it visually gives a feedback on power consumed or gained. There's also an option to show an animated display on the center console detailing how power is consumed or recovered - nice as it keeps the wife busy watching this.
These are my first thoughts and views of the car after a week of owning and driving it. I will update after I have some more time with it, especially after the engine breaks in and I can actually drive it - rather than nurse it.
About the electronics gadgets: I was able to interface my android smartphone to use some of the media I had to copy to it so I was not limited to listening to the radio. I was also able to find a USB-C stick to load some media to it. I did not like that the car only has USB-C sockets. Perhaps in 5 years that will be all there is but today I had to look around to find even a single 32Gb stick with USB-C connection. Thankfully it offers both a USB-2 full size connector and I can connect it to my home computer as my only two things with USB C are my car and my phone (and now a single USB stick). How do I miss the days when I could bring a few cassettes to the car and listen to them. Or even audio CDs or CDR with MP3.
It's a brand new car and sold as a premium one, so of course everything works smoothly and it's full with gadgets and electronics - more of which later on.
It's my first experience in my 35 years of driving with an automatic transmission and that took all of 20 minutes to get used to - much less than I expected. And I liked it. And I like it even more by the day. One of the biggest "upgrades" in the new car and not one I had in my mental list.
So, leaving aside all the "irrelevant" stuff, let's focus on the electric driving experience. In short, I like it. The petrol engine doesn't make a loud noise or vibrations but you can hear it when it's pushed. The electric motor of just 115HP has so much torque that acceleration from a stop is similar or perhaps better than the S3 - save for uphill starting where the front wheel drive shows it's limitations. Perhaps 245HP on the front axle is too much.
My daily driving needs call for 45km to work and back including the usual detours for grocery shopping and the car gives an advertised 45-55km electric range. After the first full charge it showed 53km and that keeps coming down daily and seems to settle around 49km so far. In reality it realizes 44-46km in the 5 days I've driven it to work and back, which is plenty for my daily needs.
Driving is fine and the switchover from electric to ICE is not noticeable in the few times it occurred. Actually it's hard to convince the car to switch to ICE. Especially on a full battery. It does turn on the ICE when pushed but I don't want to push it hard until after the first 1000km or so to allow the engine to break in. And it's hard to run the engine to make these 1000km when it just will go electric, so I decided to stop recharging at night until I have done some mileage.
Recharging - for me - is straightforward. I'm parking inside and I had already installed a 20A/240V outlet by the parking space when the house was built 10 years ago. The "compact e-tron" charger that comes with the car just plugs on the wall and the car. Charges at 2.4kW (I believe) and it takes it 5.5hours to charge the 14kWh battery. There's also a 11kW cable for public chargers but I can't see myself looking for a public AC charger and then wait for a couple of hours for the car to charge.
What is very useful is that the car has a scheduler function for charging. I set it up to charge between midnight and 7:00am with a departure time of 8:00am. It will start charging during off-peak hours when electricity is much cheaper. It will even (it's an option) turn on the auxiliary air-conditioning unit to set the inside temperature to whatever is selected by the controls in preparation for departure. Not critical for me as it's parked inside but in the heatwave we are currently in, that inside temperature reaches 29 degrees C so it's nice to find the car ready at 22C.
Since my daily driving routines are covered by the battery capacity, driving to work and back is mostly electric. But that's not the way hybrids are supposed to be driven. They are to be considered a dual fuel - dual engine vehicles with the possibility to combine the power outputs and also recuperate energy during braking. I'm thinking of the scenario to leave home fully charged, drive EV in the neighborhood, hybrid on the motor way and EV when looking for a place to park. But that's for longer journeys. For daily use, electricity is about 4,5x cheaper than gasoline here so daily driving EV makes more sense financially.
Even though the car doesn't have explicit "recuperation control", I've discovered - but not seen it in the manual - that choosing shifting mode and drive mode sets recuperation mode as well. It's an automatic transmission but it's a Tip Tronic one. Which means it can run in fully auto with two modes (Drive and Sport) and also manual mode. The cool thing is that even if switched to manual, it won't stick to the wrong gear but revert to auto changing if the driver forgets to focus on shifting gears. I will probably never use manual mode.
Choosing the "D" mode, combined with "Auto" or "Comfort" drive mode gives a high priority to EV and when you release the accelerator it just rolls. Recuperation is achieved by pressing the brake, the more you press, the more it recuperates. The actual brakes engage much later on, during hard braking. It appears that recuperation alone slows down the car effectively.
Choosing the "S" mode, gives the ICE a chance and it will engage whenever power output requested exceeds something between 25 and 50%. And in this mode, when you release the accelerator, it immediately starts to recuperate hard to the point you rarely need to brake. It looks like it slows down much faster when there are vehicles in the front compared to just releasing the accelerator on an empty road. In slow traffic, when you need to stop and go all the time, EV is always engaged. The ICE seems to kick in when speed is above a threshold. And the automatic gearbox chooses the optimum gear to set the engine speed to about 2.000-2.500rpm, so 6th gear is reached pretty fast.
The virtual cockpit dashboard has an option to show engine speed or a power meter. With automatic transmission, the power meter is more useful as it visually gives a feedback on power consumed or gained. There's also an option to show an animated display on the center console detailing how power is consumed or recovered - nice as it keeps the wife busy watching this.
These are my first thoughts and views of the car after a week of owning and driving it. I will update after I have some more time with it, especially after the engine breaks in and I can actually drive it - rather than nurse it.
About the electronics gadgets: I was able to interface my android smartphone to use some of the media I had to copy to it so I was not limited to listening to the radio. I was also able to find a USB-C stick to load some media to it. I did not like that the car only has USB-C sockets. Perhaps in 5 years that will be all there is but today I had to look around to find even a single 32Gb stick with USB-C connection. Thankfully it offers both a USB-2 full size connector and I can connect it to my home computer as my only two things with USB C are my car and my phone (and now a single USB stick). How do I miss the days when I could bring a few cassettes to the car and listen to them. Or even audio CDs or CDR with MP3.
