Skip to main content

Watch: Record-Holding Electric A3 Does Perfect, Stationary Donut

Remember that electric A3 that outran a GT2 RS in reverse a few weeks ago? Well, it’s back and the uncanny feats of speed continue.

As you’d expect, the only appropriate next feat is, as it has always been, doing a donut. And so it shall ever be.

Except that this is less like any automotive donut you’ve ever seen than it is like a skid steer’s. And, well, that’s because that’s what’s going on.

Unlike your average car, in which all of the wheels pretty much have to be moving in the same direction, the A3 shown here can make its wheels spin in different directions.

So, as was the case with the reverse drag race, it can make the wheels one side of the car spin backward with all the motors’ might, while the others spin forward. And as a result, it can spin like a top.

Along with just being kind of cool (and a little uncanny), the tiny donut shows just how effectively the car can differentiate power from one side to the other. In practice, that means this car can send more power to the outside wheels in a corner to make it go faster.

A Tweet in this thread claims that Audi had already pulled this trick off with the R8 e-tron, but this seems to be the first footage of something like this happening

The A3 was built by Schaeffler, one of Audi’s Formula E partners. Which may be where they got the Formula E motors that power this car from. With nearly 1,200 hp on tap, it’s less than surprising that this car is quick in any direction.

[via: Jalopnik]

The post Watch: Record-Holding Electric A3 Does Perfect, Stationary Donut appeared first on VWVortex.



from VWVortex https://ift.tt/2B5FRT6
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

    When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier.  The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow.   While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something .  To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it.  Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait.  So with this in mind, we lined our G...
Post a Comment
Read more

Project Golf SportWagen- Intro

I’ve never really been one for SUVs and crossovers.  The current offerings aren’t the body-on-frame, go-anywhere specialty tools I remember from my youth, and what they lack in capability, they also lack in on-road performance. The current crop isn’t terribly good at handling or being efficient, which in my opinion are major components of our ideal driving experience.  So when it comes to space or utility, I usually look for something of the wagon variety- and it seems that I’m not alone. We hit quite a few shows around the east coast each summer, and we see modified Jetta SportWagens at nearly every event. Even amongst common consumers, these cars are highly sought-after. They don’t depreciate much, making even early Mk 5 2.5 versions expensive in comparison to other Jettas or Golfs of the same vintage. This year, Volkswagen launched their latest SportWagen, which is now billed as a Golf.  In many ways, this latest SportWagen is the best yet and it has certai...
Post a Comment
Read more

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...
2 comments
Read more