Audi revealed its first-ever electric vehicle before a crowd of nearly 2,000 in San Francisco on Monday and hinted at a sleek, battery-powered sports automobile to be launched in the near future.
The 2019 Audi e-Tron, an all-electric crossover, will be able to travel up to 248 miles on its 95-kWh battery.
Starting at just under $75,000, it will reach dealer showrooms early next year and is squarely positioned to compete with the bevy of new models coming from rival luxury brands.
With similar dimensions to Audi’s Q5 mid-size SUV, the five-passenger e-Tron is—perhaps surprisingly—a workhorse, with a large trunk and a 4,000-pound towing capacity.
“When you tell an engineer that you want an electric car with lots of range, they don’t immediately jump to SUV as their first choice for obvious reasons of physics,” Marc Lichte, Audi’s head of design, told reporters at an event before the reveal. “We wanted to create, for lack of a better term, a very normal car. We wanted a real SUV.”
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