1500 miles in...

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arne

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 25, 2016
Messages
189
Well, not quite. Actually only 1477 as of tonight. But long enough to share some thoughts. In general, we are very pleased with our decision to buy the e-tron.

We are now just a bit into our third tank of gas (petrol). Overall, that's 66.4 mpg compared to 39.2 mpg over the 60,000 miles in the TDI. We've only used the ICE twice during normal in town driving, on days when we needed to take two trips instead of our typical single trip. Even those days will not need ICE now that I have my 220v connection working.

Other random thoughts:

This car beeps to much! The most annoying are the seatbelt and passenger airbag chimes. May have to see about VCDS for those.

Hybrid mode gives great economy as long as the battery is charged. The couple of times I've used hybrid where I had battery available for the whole trip I got over 52-53 mpg. But once depleted, there doesn't seem to be any difference in behavior or economy between hybrid and hold battery modes. In those cases, we get highway mileage of about 40 in either mode.

Charge battery mode was much faster than I'd expected, but didn't seem to gain us much the one time I tried it on a longer trip. Only took about 40 minutes of driving to go from empty to full. But when I then switched to hybrid mode, it was depleted before too long.

Which brings us back to hybrid mode. Why is it calibrated to use up all the battery so fast? If the trip is longer than 150 miles, anything beyond that is just the same as hold battery. Would be nice if it could make longer use of the battery in hybrid mode.

Not impressed with the wiper blades, which is consistent with my experiences with factory blades for the TDI. May need to get a pair of PIAAs.

I'm sure I'll think of more, will add them to this thread as I do.
 
Good feedback. I'm at 2000 miles and I have basically the same feedback. The hybrid auto mode works well with a full battery. I've had a couple of trips into town/back (probably 50-60 miles roundtrip) and my mileage is similar to your. Same with the battery depleted as well.

I'll write up my experiences sometime soon. One thing I want to try is Launch Control. Saw a video and would like to see how the car handles it.
 
Oh, here's another minor gripe. Why can't I access the MMI without turning on the radio? If I am adding a destination to navigation, I don't need the entertainment to come on.
 
Hi Arne,

I'm a bit further down the road here in the UK with my e-tron, 10 months and 14,000 miles.

Not sure what you are getting all the beeping about, the UK model does not seem to beep so much and not regarding the airbags, perhaps that is a US requirement.

I think the reason you see a fast fall in the battery level from full in Hybrid Auto mode is that it maintains only a low level of battery as per non-plug-in hybrids. You will see that the journey will be on battery alone until it reaches two or three bars and then the ICE kicks in and just uses electric power at pull away and maintains that battery level. On Hybrid Hold mode the ICE is activated pretty much all the time you are accelerating, and the car acts more like a start/stop function.

I share your experience of the wiper blades, I had my rear wiper replaced at the 10,000 mile service as it was juddery.

Regards,
Andy
 
Just over 2000 miles now, nothing new to add. Still love the car, it is doing what we hoped.

Ordered a receiver hitch for it, should arrive later this week, I will document how that goes in the big hitch thread in Modifications.

We've been doing a bit more travel on the highway than is normal for us, but the overall results are still great.
 
Yeah, just took a 1500 mile road trip for Thanksgiving. Car did well, but fully loaded I got 35 mpg (driving 75-80mph). That's about what I got in my Sportwagen, so I'm satisfied. Next long trip, we'll take my wife's Jetta TDI. It's a manual and we get around 45mpg on that, no matter how hard we push it.

However, my last tank before the road trip was 140 mpg. :)
 
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