Tesla has been sitting pretty at the top of the all-electric game for a while now, without too much competition from the bigger luxury car brands like Audi and Porsche. That’s all about to change though, now that the Audi E-Tron Quattro Concept SUV and the Porsche Mission E have been announced.
The two companies flashed their electric concept cars at the Volkswagen Group's press conference yesterday and even though they won’t exactly be hitting the market anytime soon, we really like what we see. The Porsche Mission E doesn’t have a production timeline yet, but the company did reveal that it will have a 310-mile range and thanks to its 800-volt charger, it will only take 15 minutes to juice the battery up to 80 percent. With over 600hp, the Mission E will be able to hit 0-62mph in under 3.5 seconds.
It’s Porsche, so of course the car looks super cool. The cockpit has a holographic dashboard that tracks your eye movements so you can scroll through options without actually touching anything. You also may have noticed that it doesn’t have any side mirrors, instead using cameras to display blind spots in the corners of the windshield, and for some reason there’s also a camera inside that can read your mood and display it as an emoticon for social media purposes, taking road rage to new levels.
The Audi E-Tron Quattro Concept SUV isn’t as flashy as the Porsche, but it still deserves some of the spotlight. With three motors (“one electric motor drives the front axle, the two others act on the rear axle”) and a 95kWh battery pack, the model boasts 590.0 lb-ft, 500hp in boost mode, can hit 0-62mph in 4.6 seconds and reach a top speed of 130.5mph. The Audi has a range of over 310.7 miles and take around 50 minutes to get a full charge. In a press release, Prof. Dr. Ulrich Hackenberg (Member of the Audi Board of Management for Technical Development) stated that we can expect to see the all-electric SUV in early 2018.
Sure, these are merely concepts right now and who knows if they’ll be able to deliver once they actually hit the market, but they definitely hint at a pretty great future that we can’t wait to see.
