Key Highlights – 2025 Audi A6 e-tron Sportback
⚡ Power: Up to 456 hp with dual motors and quattro AWD
🔋 Range: 392 miles RWD, 377 miles AWD (EPA)
📐 Design: Sleek Sportback body improves aerodynamics and cargo space
💎 Luxury: Digital Stage screens, premium materials, refined ride
💰 Price: Starts at $65,900 MSRP
An Electric Luxury Sedan You Probably Haven’t Heard Of
The Audi A6 e-tron isn’t a car that a lot of people are asking about or are even aware of these days. For one thing, it’s a large sedan, which means it competes in a segment that’s been shrinking for many years as consumer tastes shift towards taller and theoretically more practical and versatile SUVs. Plus, it’s electric, landing at dealerships across North America just as interest in electric vehicles wanes.
Ongoing anxiety about charging infrastructure and disappearing federal EV subsidies make the A6 e-tron, which has a starting MSRP of $65,900, a car you will need to buy on its merits and not just because you could save a lot of money upfront, and with lower running costs.
Fortunately, the A6 e-tron has a lot of merits, and many of those merits have to do with its increasingly-less-popular body style. Like all EVs, the A6 e-tron is swift, silent, smooth, and packed with tech, but thanks to its shape, it’s also remarkably efficient and long-range when compared to the SUV norm.
Trading a Little Space for a Lot of Range
Technically, the A6 e-tron isn’t actually a sedan. Audi calls it a Sportback, a sleek teardrop that sits somewhere between a sedan and a hatchback, with an elegant roofline that flows right to the end of the car. Instead of a trunk lid, there’s a huge hatch, which opens on an enormous cargo area. Unless you regularly pack your SUV right to the roof, you’ll find almost as much space for stuff in here as Audi’s related Q6 e-tron SUV – and it’s easier to load, too, thanks to a lower floor.
In addition to a certain sporty elegance, the A6 e-tron’s profile is key to its remarkable efficiency. Consider this: fitted with the same 100-kWh (94.6 kWh usable) battery, a Q6 e-tron will go 321 miles on a full charge in rear-wheel drive form, or 307 miles with dual-motor quattro all-wheel drive, according to EPA range estimates. Max range for the A6 e-tron in rear-drive form? A whopping 392 miles, according to the EPA, or 377 miles with all-wheel drive. That’s a really meaningful upgrade, one that could make the difference between having to stop to charge on a long road trip or simply driving straight through.
Inside the A6 e-tron
You do not give up a lot of space or versatility for choosing the A6 over the Q6 e-tron either. Indeed, as it is built on the same all-new, dedicated electric platform as its stablemate, the A6’s cabin still sits on top of that big battery, with a relatively high floor and elevated driving position. Should you need more space than the vast cargo area provides, you can flip the rear seats down easily, and there’s under-floor storage as well.
Even with the seat cranked all the way down, you sit higher than you would in most sedans, with an excellent view of the road and your surroundings. The roof, while sleek, is high enough to clear six-footers even in the back seats. There’s plenty of leg- and elbow-room front and rear, though the seating position in either row puts your knees up at an unnatural angle thanks to low seats combined with a high floor.
The A6 e-tron follows in the Q6 e-tron’s footsteps in adopting Audi’s new “digital stage” driver interface, with a giant curved panel integrating both a high-resolution 11.9-inch instrument cluster as well as a 14.5-inch infotainment display. Wireless CarPlay and Android Auto are standard, as you would expect, and there’s a fine augmented-reality head-up display as well.
All the tech is, for the most part, easy to use and understand, but the array of configuration options is truly dizzying, and it works best if you “log in” with a personalized ID, adding a layer of complexity to not just every drive, but the setup process as well. My tester didn’t feature the optional 10.9-inch passenger screen, which I considered to be a blessing; there are enough screens in here, thanks very much.
There’s also an awful lot of gloss black plastic – some of it a screen, some of it trim – inside the A6 e-tron’s cabin, which somewhat detracts from the premium ambiance we’ve come to expect from Audi. The seats are covered in lovely leather, you can get matte-finish wood trim, and build quality is as fantastic as you would expect, but all the shiny black soon becomes a mess of fingerprints, smudges, and micro-scratches. The hard plastics on the lower parts of the dash, console, and doors doesn’t feel premium, either.
How Does It Drive?
No such qualms about the way the A6 e-tron drives. Electric power gives it the smoothness, silence, and refinement of cars from several classes above, while the low-slung weight of the battery helps both ride quality and handling. Like its Q6 relative, the A6 e-tron delivers a calm, relaxed drive, with liquid-feeling steering and easy-to-modulate brakes. Ride quality is serene, too, even without air suspension, and the sleek, aerodynamic body means a near-total lack of wind noise.
It doesn’t lack for urge, either, when you put your foot down. Quattro all-wheel drive and dual motors mean the 456 horses, from launch control start to extra-legal speeds, push forward in an unrelenting rush – there are no gearchanges, no aural drama, just pure speed. Not enough for you? The pricier S6 e-tron gives you another 50 or so horses and a lot more equipment for about 13 grand more.
Competitors to the Audi A6 e-tron
Still, if driving thrills are what you’re after, you might be better served by the BMW i5, which has a starting MSRP of $67,100 for the eDrive40, or $70,100 for the all-wheel drive xDrive40. The i5 is a much more conventional package than the A6 e-tron, its architecture shared with the gasoline 5 Series. It’s a conventional sedan that has space up front for an engine, and as such, falls far short of the A6 e-tron for spaciousness and versatility.
But there’s no doubt that the BMW steers more sharply, accelerates more ferociously – especially in top-of-the-line M60 form – and is simply more engaging, from its perfectly-weighted controls to its Hans Zimmer-scored electric soundtrack. It also has a more finely finished cabin with better seats and nicer materials, even if space is relatively poor.
A closer match to the A6 e-tron in tech and luxury is the Mercedes-Benz EQE. Like the A6 e-tron, it’s built on a dedicated EV platform, which means it is very spacious and versatile for its footprint; and it too is packed with screens and shiny black plastic. The interior materials of the Mercedes, however, are a cut above. The driving experience is pretty similar, though the Mercedes offers less horsepower than the Audi, and EPA range estimates are poor in comparison – up to 308 miles. Starting MSRP is an attractive $64,950.
While Tesla offers two sedans, the smaller model 3 and the larger model S, both feel like mainstream and not luxury products, and the German trio sit between the two in terms of size, if not price.
Will Sedans Make a Comeback?
Beyond that, there are very few electric luxury sedans to speak of in the market, though at least Lexus has committed to bringing an EV version of its next-generation ES to market soon.
Given my experience with the A6 e-tron, that’s kind of a shame. Electric power works really well in a luxury car, elevating refinement levels thanks to smoothness and silence; and sedans offer appreciable advantages in range and efficiency – in the Audi’s case, almost 90 extra miles on every charge – without major sacrifices in space and versatility.
North Americans’ addiction to truck formats isn’t likely to go away. Trucks of various shapes accounted for four out of five passenger vehicles sold in 2024, a new record, but in the electric age, as buyers put sharp focus on efficiency and range, it’s likely that we’ll start to see a few more sedan options as well. The Audi A6 e-tron is one of the good ones: fast, refined, luxurious, versatile, and most importantly, very efficient, too.
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