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Fancy Bugatti power from your Audi A6 Avant estate? Well, German tuning firm ABT can help. ABT has a long, and pretty glorious, history of tweaking and tuning Audis into Autobahn missiles and Nurburgring monsters. Its relationship with Audi is actually so close that it has often run works motor racing teams on behalf of the Ingolstadt brand, including the works Formula E electric racing team.
This time, though, ABT has kind of gone a step beyond the usual air-filter-and-bigger-turbo tuning setup. The company already makes a specially tweaked version of the mighty 560hp Audi RS 6, which raises peak power to 730hp, thanks to its own in-house ABT Engine Control (AEC, and a special exhaust system.
This, the ABT Audi RS 6-E prototype goes one better, though. Actually, it goes around 300 better, by taking peak power to a rocking 1,108hp. That's thanks to the addition of a hybrid electric module which adds 288hp and 317Nm of torque to the mix. Interestingly, this is a hybrid which doesn't allow you to run on electric power around town, but instead only works at speeds above 100km/h. According to ABT: "As the enormous additional power is only activated when needed, a relatively compact battery with a capacity of 13.6 kWh is sufficient."
Needless to say, all this extra oomph comes with some other add-ons to help keep the car on terra firma. There's an ABT bodykit, which includes front lip, front skirt add-ons, mirror caps, fender inserts, side skirt add-ons and rear skirt add-ons including rear spoiler. The 21-inch alloys include the ABT AERO-Ring aerodynamic concept, and there are special suspension springs, supplied by H&R, and the whole car has been lowered, of course.
It's just a prototype for now, but according to ABT, it's very much a vision of the future: "Will we still be able to refer to car enthusiasts as "petrolheads" in the future?" ABT asks, rhetorically. "Or will they be seduced by the whisper-quiet punch of electric drives? ABT Sportsline uses a fully operational prototype to provide an exciting glimpse of the future of tuning. The worldwide largest tuner for Audi and Volkswagen vehicles shows how to bring the best of both worlds together."