Audi has added a plug-in hybrid powertrain to its A8 luxury car range.
Plug-in A8 has 700Nm of torque
The A8 L 60 TFSI e quattro (mouthful) uses a 3.0-litre turbocharged V6 petrol engine with 340hp and 500Nm of torque. To that is added a (wait for it) permanently excited synchronous machine (snigger), or PSM. That's an electric motor, in case you were wondering. It has peak outputs of 100kW and 350Nm of torque.
Combined, these two power sources generate a total of 449hp and 700Nm of torque. That's enough to shove the big A8 from standstill to 100km/h in just 4.9 seconds, and on to a top speed of 250km/h.
CO2 emissions too high to qualify for SEAI grant
More important by far are the 60 TFIS e's green credentials. That PSM motor takes its feed from a 14.1kWh battery stack. Charge that up fully, and it has a claimed WLTP electric-only range of 46km - significantly, that won't be sufficient for the A8 to qualify for Ireland's new plug-in hybrid purchase grant. Its CO2 emissions of between 57 and 61g/km would also disqualify it from the SEAI grant, as announced in the budget. Audi claims combined fuel economy of 2.7 litres per 100km, or 104mpg for the A8 60 TFSI e.
The battery can be charged in around 2.5 hours from a 7.4kW wall charger, or around six hours from a domestic socket.
Clever regenerative braking system
Fire up the new plug-in A8, and it will always (charge allowing) start in fully electric mode. There's a discreet 'EV" button in the lower of the two central touchscreen panels that allows the driver to juggle which mode the car is working in, and how the petrol and electric motors are interacting. When driving in Hybrid mode, there's an 'Auto' function that takes account of your entered sat-nav destination, and parcels out the electric power accordingly, both to make the car as efficient as possible, and to make sure you arrive at any urban destination with enough charge for some zero-emissions about-town motoring. The system takes in data from the navigation setup, for example speed limits, types of roads and uphill and downhill gradients. The data from the camera and radar that monitor the traffic ahead is also included here.
There's also a 'Hold' function for longer main-road journeys that hangs on to whatever charge is in the battery so that you arrive with as much battery range as possible.
As well as all that, there's a smart brake energy recuperation system, which uses both the car's location and the surrounding traffic to judge how much to slow the car, or whether or not to let it coast freely, when you take your foot off the accelerator. The A8 can recover as much as 25kW of electrical energy under coasting, and a massive 80kW under braking, thanks to the fact that as much as 90 per cent of the car's braking needs are taken care over by using the electric motor to slow down.
There's also a haptic 'pulse' feedback through the accelerator to prompt the driver to lift off the throttle to help save fuel, and the way the petrol and electric halves of the car interact is also controlled by switching the car between Dynamic, Efficiency, and Comfort modes.
The A8 also gets a 'synthetic e-sound' which basically means it hums, through a loudspeaker in the front wheelarch, so that clueless pedestrians don't step out in front of you so much.
You can now also use the myAudi app in your smartphone to find local charging points, check the battery and range status, start the charging process, program the charge timer and view the charge and consumption statistics. Needless to say, the climate control can be pre-set to have the car heated or cooled while it is charging, and there's a heat-pump for the climate, so that it draws less power from the battery when on the move.
You'll tell the A8 TFSI e apart from its more 'normal' brethren from its new lights, which are meant to reference those used by the e-tron quattro SUV, and it comes with both a unique grille design, and special 19-inch 'aero-optimised' alloys.
How much? Well, it will retail in Germany for a price of €109,000, which would suggest a price of around €150,000 when it reaches Irish shores. First deliveries, in Europe at any rate, begin before the end of the year.