Audi Q4 E-Tron Review (2021-present)

What is the Audi Q4 E-Tron?

The new Audi Q4 E-Tron is the mid-sized family SUV in Audi’s line-up of pure electric cars. As the badging suggests, it’s a bit bigger than an Audi Q3, but shorter than the Audi Q5. There's also a Q4 E-Tron Sportback version, which has a slinkier roofline for more style.

The Q4 E-Tron also represents the most attainable pure electric car yet, in the Audi range, being the first non-luxury EV that the brand has launched following the expensive Audi E-Tron SUV and Audi E-Tron GT. The Q4 E-Tron is designed to take on the likes of the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Mercedes EQA, Tesla Model Y, Skoda Enyaq iV and Volkswagen ID.4; and talking of which, the Q4 E-Tron sits on the same Volkswagen Group ‘MEB’ platform as the Enyaq and ID.4. It’s a new platform that VW Group has designed specifically for battery electric vehicles (BEVs) like the Audi Q4 E-Tron.

Battery options are either a 52- or 77kWh battery pack, called the Audi Q4 35 E-Tron and Audi Q4 40 E-Tron, respectively, which offer a maximum official WLTP electric range of either 208 miles or 316 miles. The Audi Q4 50 E-Tron also uses that big battery but replaces the standard rear-wheel drive layout with four-wheel drive, and boosts power to 295bhp for a hearty 0-62mph time of 6.2sec, and manages an official range of 298 miles. High spec trims with bigger alloy wheels make for less efficient running, and will see those range figures drop by up to 20 miles.

How practical is it?

Space is fairly plentiful in the Q4 E-Tron, but there are certainly more practical options. You’ll get two tall adults in the back seats with no issues, but three will be tight for elbow room and whoever ends up in the middle sits on a firm, raised cushion. The 520-litre boot is big enough to easily take a chunky buggy, and it has convenient underfloor storage for the cables, even if the fairly high load lip might make it a bit of a chore to lug heavy items in and out.

The rear seats fold in a 60/40 split on lower trims, or Edition 1 and up get 40/20/40 split seats that let you through-load longer items while still carrying two rear passengers. Great for carrying the jousting team to a tournament, although the Q4 E-Tron’s maximum 1000kg towing limit (1200kg on the Q4 50 E-Tron) does mean that somebody else will have to take the horses.

It’s worth considering that, while the new Q4 E-Tron is perfectly adequate in terms of practicality, alternatives like the Skoda Enyaq iV, VW ID.4 and Ford Mustang Mach-E are all usefully more spacious, and the Ford is also usefully quicker for a similar price.

What's it like to drive?

We’ve so far only driven the mid-range Q4 40 E-Tron, which gets 201bhp and a 0-62mph time of 8.2sec. It’s the sweet spot in the range on balance of price and driving range, and it’s also very slick to drive.

Ride comfort on the 19-inch wheels of entry-level Sport trim is pleasantly cushy, and feels composed even over scruffy town roads, although mid-corner expansion joints and the like can send a heavy thump through the cabin. While the steering is a little too light, and is short of much sense of feedback even in Sport mode, it’s also precise and gives you enough confidence to swing the Q4 E-Tron gamely through fast direction changes. Throttle response away from a standstill is a little slow, but otherwise the performance on offer feels gutsy and, with the seamless delivery of an electric motor, the Q4 E-Tron is easy to drive fluidly in the normal ebb and flow of traffic.

The brake regeneration system will help with that, too. It has an automatic function that uses the same tech as adaptive cruise control, as well as information from the satnav, to ‘see’ when there’s a car, junction, or even a change in speed limit ahead. Then it uses that information and automatically starts to gently apply the brakes if you lift off the accelerator, in order to gather energy tand eke out a few more miles of range. It does feel weird at first, so expect to need to get used to it, but it is easy to live with once you are.

Unlike many other EVs, the Audi Q4 E-Tron defaults to no regenerative braking at all if the road is clear ahead, so you can lift off the throttle and it will coast freely. You can turn the adaptive brake regeneration function off, should you wish, and it’s also a nice touch that you can easily control how strong the regenerative braking is by toggling the steering wheel paddles.

What might take more getting used to than any of the fancy driver aids and dynamic features, is the square steering wheel. Well, alright, so it’s sort of square, and it’s optional on Sport and S Line trims, or standard on Edition 1 and Vorsprung. It does look cool, and it fits in nicely with the angular lines of the rest of the Q4 E-Tron’s interior, but it also feels a bit odd if you like to let the wheel feed through your hands. We still prefer a round steering wheel. Unless it’s a Formula One car, a squared-off steering wheel definitely feels like a case of marketing over common sense.

Technology, equipment & infotainment

What is, in fact, far more irritating than a funky-shaped steering wheel, are the touch-sensitive controls on that steering wheel. It’s way too easy to unintentionally touch the volume control on the wheel, in particular, and end up with your music suddenly muted or turned up to the max.

The rest of the dashboard feels well put together and is reasonably plush, but it's nowhere near as dazzling for interior quality as the Mercedes EQA. The dash is topped with a 10.1-inch colour touchscreen. This is one of the better infotainment systems in the class, with a screen that responds quickly, and menu layouts that are more logical than those in the VW ID.4. Features include satnav, Android Auto and wireless Apple CarPlay, digital radio and more.

It’s also great that Audi has used traditional rotary knobs for the standard three-zone climate control, as it’s way easier to use than the touch-sensitive controls that are incorporated into the screens on some rivals.

Comfort and convenience equipment is also good. Even entry-level Sport models get the touchscreen, the ‘virtual cockpit’ digital drivers dials, heated seats, rear parking sensors and LED headlights. S Line model gets bigger wheels, sports suspension and interior ambient lighting, while Edition 1 gets leather upholstery, electric seat adjustment, even more ambient lighting, matrix LED headlights and more.

The biggest frustration is that, unless you go for top-spec Vorsprung, you have to pay £1295 for the Comfort and Sound pack to get adaptive cruise control and a reversing camera. Sure, that includes an upgrade to a posh Sonos sound system, but it’s annoying that it costs to get these features that should be standard on a premium SUV like this.

Audi Q4 E-Tron running costs

The Audi Q4 E-Tron is competitively priced against rivals like the Mercedes EQA and Ford Mustang Mach-E, but finance deals can be a bit pricey, even next to other premium alternatives.

When you’ve got your Audi Q4 E-Tron on the driveway, running it should be fairly affordable by posh SUV standards. Electric cars are much cheaper to ‘fuel’ than petrol or diesel cars, so expect to be paying around 5p per mile if you charge at home all the time and are using a competitive home energy tariff. That’s around a third what you’ll pay to fuel an efficient petrol car.

Fitting a home wallbox charger costs from under £400 and your Audi dealer can help sort the paperwork to have it fitted.

Public rapid chargers can be quite expensive to fill up at, though, which is something to factor in if you do a lot of mileage and expect to use public rapid charging regularly. The ‘E-Tron charging service’ – a card that can be used across a wide variety of public charging providers for a pre-agreed tariff – is also worth considering if you do high miles.

Because it’s an electric car, there’s no road tax to pay (which is £155 per year for petrol or diesel cars), and you avoid the expensive £335 ‘premium tax’ that is applied to all non-electric cars costing more than £40,000 for years two to six of ownership. The tax savings over an equivalent diesel or petrol rival to the Audi Q4 E-Tron add up to some £2,450 if you keep the car for six years.

Insurance is manageable, and similar to what you’ll pay for other comparable premium SUVs.

Servicing is needed every couple of years, and you can pay on fixed monthly payments costing from £22 per month.

Audi Q4 E-Tron reliability

The Audi Q4 E-Tron is too new to have any data available on its reliability. However, Audi offers a three-year, 60,000-mile warranty as standard and you can extend that up to five years and 100,000 miles of coverage. That’s fairly standard in the industry, but with rivals like Kia offering a seven-year warranty as standard, it’s starting to look a bit shabby. The battery pack in the Audi Q4 E-Tron is covered for eight years and 100,000 miles, and if you are concerned about battery life and degradation then you probably shouldn’t be.

Modern lithium-ion batteries like those in the Q4 E-Tron have proven to last many hundreds of thousands of miles, and while you will lose some of the maximum range potential over that time it’s likely to be fairly minimal. You should expect to lose roughly 10-15% of the range potential over ten years and 100,000 miles of use, and if you maintain the battery well then you could well see it perform even better than that. Top it up between 20-80% whenever you don’t need the full range potential, try not to use rapid charging stations regularly, and don’t leave it plugged in and fully charged at home for days on end, and you’ll minimise the battery degradation over time.

Electric cars are also typically more reliable than petrol and diesel cars thanks to the fewer moving parts in their motors, but there can still be issues with software, charging hardware and more. Audi as a brand fared a middling 18th out of 30 brands that were included in the 2021 What Car? reliability survey.