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Audi Q4 e-tron (2024) Review
The first time I saw an e-tron was in Berlin during art week, or Berlinale, 2018 or 2019. It was some event where they used Q8 cars as taxis. I thought they looked great! This was a few years before my interest in automotive HMI. This summer I rented an Audi Q4 Sportback e-tron 45 for about two weeks and drove from Zurich to the Côte d’Azur.
This configuration was 65.000 € as tested.
Let’s get this out of the way first. Again, no app. This time the process seemed promising, but the final step required confirmation from the dealership. I didn’t want to involve the poor clerk at Europcar. No matter the excuse, no app could be used. This time the pain was greater because I had the car for almost two weeks. Why do I always go on about the app? Isn’t driving experience about the car? Isn’t the app merely optional? Sure. But user experience touches all aspects of ownership, and being able to monitor the charging process remotely is a quality-of-life improvement. Not only is it useful to keep an eye on the status at a fast charger at a highway stop, but even when charging at home.
The house I stayed at has old, unreliable wiring. Running the washer and dryer at the same time trips the circuit breaker. Try adding an EV to the mix. The car could only be charged at night, when nothing else was adding significant load to the grid. After dinner, I had to manually plug in the car, and in the morning before turning on the Baby Gaggia unplug it again.
I was aware of some car-side automation of charging habits, but couldn’t get this to work. I don’t know if it’s because it requires the app or to be the actual owner of the vehicle, or something else.
For an SUV it handles with a surprisingly nimble reaction. It’s not a huge car, compared to the Lyric, and feels smaller than the XC40, even though it’s 15 cm longer (but 3 cm shorter).
I’m still not sure I find the car attractive. I don’t know enough about exterior design to define what bothers me: it might be the short bonnet, the sharp waistline out of nowhere, or the spoiler for ants. The A4 has better proportions, so do the Q6 and Q8. I hope this gets refined with a future model or facelift.
A few years ago I drove an Audi A4 on roughly the same journey, and the most memorable fact was that the HMI showed me the time three times. The current Audi HMI style is not for me, but it’s relatively easy to discern button states and information. Now, being able to prioritise information at a glance can be difficult. Companies often, in the name of visual consistency, make every element (digital or physical) the same shape and size. While this might be aesthetically pleasing, it’s unintuitive to use. There are no hints at what things might be more important than others. Audi, at the same time, also fails the task of creating an aesthetic UI.
They also fail when it comes to physical control hierarchy. The buttons on the wheel, while they exist, are capacitive. Good capacitive buttons provide haptic feedback and have smart rejection of unintended input. The palm of my hand constantly triggered the phone button. The button feedback is just a static click sound. Poor reward for accidental input. The shape of the steering wheel was pleasant though. While the appreciation for the squat wheel isn’t universal, I think they struck a good balance with this almost-circle with flat top and bottom.
More capacitive buttons. Why use these shitty buttons if I can use the shitty buttons on the steering wheel? Yes, they’re better for the passenger. And yes, this media control area seems like the only way to turn off my music. But it didn’t work, and I had to resolve to lowering the volume to zero, or mute it. Pressing mute also paused my music. An appreciated, albeit unexpected and perhaps unwanted side-effect.
Good: Physical climate buttons. A small display above the climate bar associates each button with a function, and provides instant feedback about temperature, fan speed, A/C mode and seat heating. Unfortunately our configuration wasn’t equipped with ventilated seats.
I couldn’t understand the native route-planner. My expectation was that entering a destination outside the range would make the system suggest relevant charging stops. Again, does this require an account? I doubt it. In the end I relied on my passenger to find good charging stops on her phone, while my phone was connected to CarPlay for Google Maps navigation. I missed Android Automotive!
One pet peeve I have is the unnecessary truncation of text. See, my destination was called “Chemin de l’Aurore” — too long for the Audi navigation screen. But if you, dear reader, use your imagination, can’t you picture just three extra characters in lieu of the ellipsis …
Audi earns a few extra points for keeping physical stalks. The hardware is good on this car! The software is usable but feels old. At least they’re keeping in the serious (boring) style, unlike Mercedes, who are going for Windows Vista.
In parts of Audi’s HMI I was wishing for Vista whimsy. Audi manages remove any sense of emotion from the most decorative parts of the interface: even setting the ambient light requires numerical analysis of facts. Is my favourite colour 17?
Software is hard! And TSA is hard. And UI design. Audi has over 80.000 employees, how is this the state of their product in 2024?
What should be shown on the cluster screen? Well, what are the homologative requirements? Current speed, current gear, state-of-charge, currently active lights? Here we are in the map view, so in addition to the legal minimum, Audi shows a perspective view of my current location with many, many, many icons of locations I don’t care about and a line indicating where I should be going (which I do care about). I also see my range (good to know), altitude (why), map scale (with icon!), time, temperature, drive mode, lane keeping (off), the current street name, the name of the next street, the name of the current song, a symbol showing how to turn next, and a bar graph showing when to turn next.
But see that TSA of 100? At the time I was in a city, where the speed limit is 50 km/h, driving as manually as an EV can be driven. ACC was off. If it had been on, would the car have accelerated to 100 km/h? What if I had gotten a ticket? Would Audi have paid for it? What did the car see? A bus? TSA should be trained to not just take any number it sees, but recognise traffic signs.
This was the first time I had a car with HUD for an extended time, and I didn’t like it. The text was too sharp. It almost hurt my eyes. The focusing action of my eyes are well-represented in this photo. It really felt like I was focusing on something in front of the road, instead of in the distance, with my natural point of focus. The convenience of keeping my eyes on the road outweighed the discomfort.
This summarises the Audi Q4 experience. Technology, implemented precisely instead of humanely. Boxes checked, not cared for. No compromises! An Audi can do everything, and the user needs to decide what to look at, how to sort the presented information, and what to act on. The car makes no decision, it’s a machine.
Throughout the HMI the car has smart and practical features, but they are always only presented, waiting for further user action and filtering, almost afraid of offending and hurting some hypothetical existing customer who’s used to a certain way of doing things. The car doesn’t do this old way any more, but also doesn’t do the new way. Hey driver, it’s up to you! Here I am, with no idea what the best action would be. A company of 80.000 should help me make the best choice.
I wish Audi would take a decision. They have good taste, squandered by committee.
