I drove Prince William's £96k EV Audi - it's the best car I've driven all year

You did what?

Ok, so we didn’t drive Prince William’s personal Audi e-tron GT, but we did drive one which could be similar to the one which we saw the heir to the throne piloting earlier this year.

Why are you driving it?

This review is part of a new series the Daily Express Car Reviews team is doing on the Royal Family, one which looks not at the royals themselves, but at the cars they drive. We wanted to try and see what attracted the UK’s next king to Audi’s flagship EV.

What is it?

Underneath, the Audi e-tron GT saloon shares a lot of its components with Porsche’s Taycan that we drove across Britain in the middle of last year. This means it has a similar sized battery and similar levels of performance depending on what battery and motor you go for you go for.

This doesn’t mean the two cars are the same however, the e-tron GT sits apart and as a competitor to its VW Group cousin just like the Audi Q7 shares its platform with Porsche’s Cayenne.

Over Easter Christopher Sharp test drove an Audi e-tron GT to find out what its like to live with (Image: Christopher Sharp)

What’s underneath the floor?

The e-tron GT we had was equipped with a 93.4kWh battery pack sending 350kW to an all-wheel drive system via a two-speed automatic gearbox. All told this gives this two-tonne plus car the ability to sprint from 0-62mph in 4.1seconds and onto a top speed of 152mph.

The WLTP range is around 296 miles for the e-tron GT and 298 for the Vorsprung model which means the real-world range will be slightly lower. Still, there’s enough range to get someone from Sandringham to Buckingham Palace and back.

If there’s no engine, what’s underneath the bonnet?

A very small frunk (front trunk) with 85 litres of space. This doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t, but it is big enough for two large bags of shopping and a lot of Duchy’s Original biscuits.

The boot at the back is much bigger. With 405 litres it’s not small and despite not being a hatchback, it has a helpfully large aperture to slide things in. This is also where your charging cables are stored in little Audi-branded bags.

The Audi has a small boot at the front and an even bigger one at the rear (Image: Christopher Sharp)

What’s it like inside?

This all depends on the spec, but our test car had a mix of cloth and leather seats, a touchscreen infotainment display and enough buttons to make it feel very tactile.

Like almost every contemporary car it is compatible with Apple CarPlay which means you can use Google Maps or Waze to places of interest like Windsor or Pen Y Fan in Wales.

One slight note, the steering wheel’s squared-off lower half won’t do it for everyone, but it gives this land missile a sense of athleticism.

Is it athletic?

Yes, and we’ll come to that later after we’ve discussed the passenger seats. The car has a sloping roofline, but the rear seats are low to the ground so that headroom isn’t as compromised as it first appears.

Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have mountains of leeway, but there’s enough space to stretch out, look out the window, and even plan a memoir.

On the road the e-tron GT is a revelation in town and out of it (Image: Christopher Sharp)

What it’s like to drive?

In a word? Assured. What I mean by this is that it handles flat and steady on the twisty stuff without so much of a complaint. On the motorway, its sheer size and proximity to the ground make it feel immensely stable even in treacherous conditions, and the key to this is the steering.

The steering?

I don’t know who’s behind it, but I’ve never driven a ground-up electric car with actual steering feel, with steering that doesn’t leave you guessing. In this, it just tells you exactly what you need to know when you need to know it, you get a true sense of what is going on when you turn the wheel.

This might be helped by the Alcantara covering, the pedal placement allowing left foot braking, or the fact that unlike when I drove the Porsche Taycan, some illness wasn’t trying to rot my body from the inside on the return route.

Whatever mix of factors, this wasn’t an EV that just relied on brute force acceleration, but made you feel involved. Yes, the size became an issue when I took it over the South Downs, half wincing even on wider sections, but even in and about town I didn’t feel that sense of not quite knowing what the front wheels were doing.

That’s a lot about steering, anything else?

I agree, good steering can’t counter a bad chassis or poor weight distribution and this platform has a great chassis and places all the weight low and close to the centre of the car for maximum stability and handling.

The interior of the e-tron GT is the right mix of modern and tactile (Image: Christopher Sharp)

So you like it then.

Yes. I think it is the most complete ground-up electric car I’ve driven. It’s also one of the best looking, it has a sense of refined aggression about it, a sense that it could be parked up as comfortably outside the Ritz as it could a race meeting in the middle of Northamptonshire or West Sussex or Kent.

Is it without its flaws? Of course not, the range is probably still a bit low, but that’s an easy criticism of any electric car and yes it feels big in the middle of a city meaning many parking spaces are too small.

However, if you can afford to spend £96,000 on an electric car, there’s a good chance you might be able to afford off-street parking or, in the case of Prince William, inherit an entire country.