German brand goes to the toughest rally in the world with an electric propulsion vehicle
The Audi RS Q e-tron with which the German manufacturer will compete in the next Dakar Rally has already started the testing phase starting to pick up dust – as you can see in the image gallery – and getting ready to write another chapter in the history of the Ingolstadt brand.
With the RS Q e-tron, Audi wants to compete with cars with conventional heat engines using a vehicle with an electric powertrain. But the technological specificity of this model led Audi to also include in the e-tron for the Dakar a combustion engine to generate the power of the powertrain.
The idea is about a year old and starting from “a sheet of paper in “white” as the director of Audi Sport GmbH, Julius Seebach, has already started to materialize.
“The quattro was a revolution in the World Rally Championship. Audi was the first brand to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans with an electric powertrain. Now, we want to enter a new era in the Dakar Rally by testing and developing our e-tron technology under extreme conditions.”
This RS Q e-tron kinematic chain includes two electric motors – one per axle – coming from the Audi e-tron FE07 Formula E each having Motor Units -Generator (MGU) suffered only “small modifications” to adapt to the Dakar.
A third MGU of identical design is used in the power converter to recharge the 50 kWh battery in progress – which also recovers energy with regenerative braking. And it is in this charging process that the combustion engine enters.
The energy converter includes the TFSI block that Audi uses in the DTM and it is the combustion engine that charges the battery – with an estimated consumption by the brand of less than 200 g per kWh – and which will allow a competition vehicle with electric propulsion to do the tough stages of the Dakar, which sometimes reach 800 kilometers away.
