The Car Aficionado

Driving a $200,000 electric car is not the electrifying experience you might imagine. Simply push the start button, lift your foot off the brake, and roll away. No noise, no fuss, not even any sparks. 

Think of the E-tron [caps provided] as a battery-operated version of the Audi R8, the mid-engine sports car it mostly resembles. "We basically took an R8, sawed it into pieces, stretched the wheelbase, lowered the height, removed the internal combustion engine, then added batteries and four electric motors," says Thomas Kraeuter, Audi's technical project manager, about his latest project.

Incredibly, Kraeuter's team took the E-tron from concept to prototype in only nine months, officially unswaddling it in time for the Frankfurt Motor Show in September. By December, they were offering journalists the opportunity to drive their baby up and down the California coast. 

A short stretch of it, anyway, while escorted by California Highway Patrol. Still, I had no problem breaking the speed limit, nudging the prototype E-tron to its electronic limit at 75 miles per hour.