Audi Q6 E-Tron vs Lamborghini Aventador

What's the difference?

The Q6 e-tron knocks the luxury SUV formula out of the park, regardless of the fact it’s an electric vehicle. It has a slick, sporty feel, a high level of standard equipment for a premium car and at least on paper it’s a solid EV with plenty of driving range.

But here’s the thing: To me, the Q6 e-tron feels exactly how you would expect it to. It’s the same Audi formula, just upgraded for the electric age and in an era where rivals both old and new are using this once-in-a generation opportunity to truly innovate, there’s something a little disappointing about that.

The Aventador isn't the best car you can buy for the money and truth be told, it isn't the best Lamborghini, which is a bit tough when you remember the only other car they make at the moment is the V10 Huracan. But it's all about the theatre as much as being a very capable supercar. 

I'm not a Lamborghini fanboy, but I completely get the Aventador. It's a because-we-can car, just like the Murcielago, Diablo and Countach before it. But unlike those cars, it's thoroughly modern and with the upgrades introduced to the S, it's faster, harder and enormously entertaining. 

As the last of a dying breed it delivers on everything a Lamborghini should - amazing looks, nutty price tag and an engine that excites not just driver and passenger but anyone with a heartbeat. It's by far the most charismatic car you can buy, no matter how many zeroes are on the cheque.

Photography by Rhys Vanderside

At a distance, the Q6 sticks to the same Audi formula. An inoffensive overall shape with the same core design cues as something like a Q5 are all part of the plan according to the brand, as it attempts to make the idea of switching to electric as easy as possible for its loyal buyers.

Things like the inverted grille (where there’s body colour where black would normally be) framed by a sporty black insert in the shape of Audi's usual combustion grille feels more tactfully executed than Mercedes’ attempt to bring an electrified touch to its EQ range.

Up close though, I must admit this car looks a bit meaner than your average Q-series SUV. The way the wheels sit wide and bold, accentuated by the inflated wheel arches (or blisters as Audi calls them) give the Q6 a tough feel, sitting boldly on its haunches.

Audi fans will love the exterior design, and it may convert some to electric car buyers, but it’s hard to see this car bringing new buyers into the fold, especially with more radical designs out there to catch the eyeballs of aspirational EV buyers.

Inside, Audi has traded away the somewhat ageing feeling of the outgoing Q5 for something much more tech-y in the Q6. The dash is dominated by the three large screens, which are also sharp, fast and responsive, with improved software this time around.

It is a lot though. While the exterior design plays it safe and the interior avoids the kind of obnoxiousness of an overbearing portrait-oriented screen, it feels almost unnecessary for every grade to get the three-screen layout.

Elsewhere the textures and patterns feel the part, and there’s no shortage of attention to detail when it comes to soft trims down the centre console, or clever new air vent fittings, for example.

Asking if there's anything interesting about a Lamborghini design is kind of like asking if the sun is warm.

While there are some geese out there in the corners of the internet who think Audi has ruined Lamborghini styling, there is absolutely nothing shy about the Aventador. It's an incredible looking machine and, if I may say so, shouldn't be had in black because you miss a lot of the madder details.

This car is all about the experience.

It might look close to the deck in the photos, but however low you think it is, it's lower. The roofline barely makes it to the bottom of a Mazda CX-5's windows - you need your wits about you in this car because people just don't see you.

It is absolutely spectacular - people stop and point, one chap sprinted an easy 200 metres to take a photo of it in the Sydney CBD. Hello, if you're reading.

Inside is pretty tight indeed. It's amazing to think that a car 4.8 metres long (a Hyundai Santa Fe is 4.7 metres) struggles to contain two people over six feet tall. My six foot two photographer's head left an impression in the headlining. It's a tiny cabin. It's not a bad one though, it even has a cupholder on the rear bulkhead behind the seats.

The centre console is covered in Audi-based switchgear and is all the better for it, even if it is starting to look a bit old (those bits are from a pre-facelift B8 A4). The alloy gearshift paddles are fixed to the column and are brilliant to look at and touch, while the digital dashboard - which changes with the driving mode - is fantastic even if the reversing camera is awful.

This brings us nicely across to practicality, because along with the enormous set of screens, the Q6 brings with it a significant reduction in the amount of switchgear available. The centre console still features a physical volume dial, and there are a handful of shortcut buttons, but the climate functions are exclusively controlled via touchscreen menus. 

Additionally, the Q6 features an array of haptic buttons on the steering wheel (which some will remember, were much maligned on Volkswagen products) alongside a huge haptic panel on the driver's side door controlling everything from the headlights to the windows and mirrors.

It feels as though Audi has dressed the cabin up with new stuff rather than cost-cutting, which is often the case with its rivals. To Audi's credit, these functions are well enough laid out they didn’t bring much frustration on our test drive. Mercifully the screens are fast so adjusting functions is instantaneous, but these features are never as easy to use as physical buttons when you’re trying to concentrate on the road.

No matter how well they work, not everyone will love them (especially rusted-on Audi buyers who will be used to a decent array of physical switches).

There’s plenty of storage in the cabin. The doors feature a big pocket and bottle holder, with a further two bottle holders in the centre with adjustable ridges and a gloss roller cover to keep things tidy when you’re not using them.

Up front there’s a large storage bay with the phone charger mounted vertically on its side to minimise the amount of space it uses. The centre console box is shallow but extends quite far under the console owing to the car’s electric platform, and the array of charging ports are easy enough to reach.

As usual with Audis, the front seats are bolstered nicely and there’s no shortage of adjustment on offer to find a comfortable seating position.

The back seat is spacious enough, although I was expecting more for a car on a new EV platform designed to be larger than the already-spacious Q5. At 182cm tall I have decent, but not a massive amount of room behind my own driving position, with airspace for both my knees and my head. As a saving grace here, the floor is more or less flat and the car is quite wide so the centre position will still be useful for a full-sized adult.

Storage comes via bottle holders and pockets in each door and nettings (which I don’t love as they tend to age poorly) on the backs of the front seats. Unlike the Q5 the rear row is fixed instead of on rails, but it does feature individually folding seat backs, which means you can drop the centre position to put long objects in the cabin and still have two rear passengers (kind of like a ski port, but better).

The boot measures 526 litres (or 1529L with the rear seats down) which seems about right, although we didn’t have a chance to test it with our usual luggage set. It has some space under the floor for the storage of cables, although like many EVs it doesn’t have a spare wheel, only an inflator kit. It also has a frunk, which measures 64 litres. These spaces might seem like a bit of a gimmick but the Q6 comes with a clever little fitted duffle bag which slots perfectly into the void where you can keep both your wall socket and Type 2 to Type 2 charging gear.

Yes, well. There's not a lot of space because a V12 is not just big all on its own, all the ancillaries to support it rob a lot of the remaining space. Having said that, there's room in the front for soft bags with a 180-litre front boot, space for two people inside, a cupholder and a glove box.

And the doors open up into the sky rather than out like a normal car's. Who cares if it's impractical, it's hardly something that's going to stop someone buying one.

As with any Italian supercar, the price-to-feature ratio is rather higher than your average humdrum hatchback. A 'naked' Aventador S starts at a horse-spooking $789,425 and basically has no direct competition. Ferrari's F12 is front-mid engined and any other V12 is either a decidedly different Rolls Royce-type machine or super-expensive niche manufacturer (yes, niche compared to Lamborghini) like Pagani. They're a rare very breed, Lambo knows it, and here we are a sneeze-on-the-spec sheet away from $800,000.

So you have to keep two things in mind when rating a car's value for money at this level. The first is that there isn't any real rival in a pure sense, and if there was, it would be the same price and have the same spec. That's not excusing it, by the way, it's an explanation.

Anyway.

For your eight hundy you get 20-inch front wheels and 21-inch rears, climate control, cruise control, 7.0-inch screen (backed by an older version of Audi's MMI), four-speaker stereo with Bluetooth and USB, car cover, bi-xenon headlights, carbon ceramic brakes, electric seats, windows and mirrors, leather trim, sat nav, keyless entry and start, four-wheel steering, leather trim, digital dashboard, power folding and heated mirrors, active rear wing and active suspension.

The number of out-of-the-box options is staggering and if you're keen to really get on it, you can commission your own options when it comes to trim and paint and wheels. Let's just say that as far as the interior went, our car had almost $29,000 of Alcantara, steering wheel and yellow. The telemetry system, heated seats, some extra branding and front and reversing camera (uh-huh) added up to $24,000, the cameras almost half that total.

With all the bits and bobs, the test car we had was a sobering $910,825 before on-roads.

A lot of the bigger innovations for the Q6 e-tron can’t be as easily seen because they’re primarily a result of its new platform. This Premium Platform Electric (PPE) architecture is new to Volkswagen Group and is designed specifically by and for Audi and Porsche rather than the MEB platform which underpins both the Q4 e-tron from Audi and ID.4 from Volkswagen.

Benefits include a primarily rear-drive orientation, the ability to accommodate more sophisticated suspension layouts, software capable of reaching deeper into the car (when it comes to updates), and of course a new electrical architecture with the capability to support 800-volt systems.

Power is impressive across the range. The base Performance puts out 225kW/485Nm from its rear motor, and can sprint from 0-100km/h in 6.6 seconds. The Quattro adds a second motor on the front axle, which combines with the rear motor for totals of 285kW/580Nm. It can sprint from 0-100km/h in 5.9 seconds.

The range-topping SQ6 ups power significantly to 360kW/580Nm from its dual motors, lowering the 0-100km/h sprint time to just 4.3 seconds using launch control.

The Aventador S is powered by Automobili Lamborghini's 6.5-litre V12. You know it's a V12 because there's a plate on top of the engine (which you can see through the optional glass cover) that says so, and handily, tells you the cylinder firing order. That's a neat touch.

Buried deep in the middle of the car, this monster engine develops an astonishing 544kW (30kW up on the standard Aventador) and 690Nm. Its dry sump means the engine sits lower in the car. The gearbox is slung across the back between the rear wheels - the rear pushrod suspension actually sits on top of and across the gearbox - and is apparently brand new.

The transmission is known as an ISR (Independent Shift Rod) and has seven forward speeds and still just the one clutch. Power goes through all four wheels to the road, but it's clear the rears get the lion's share.

The 0-100km/h time is the same as the standard car, which kind of tells you that 2.9 seconds is about as quick as you can go on road tyres when you don't have four electric motors with torque from zero rpm.

Driving range is excellent no matter which variant you pick. You’d hope so given the size of this car’s nickel-manganese cobalt battery pack. The usable 94.9kWh capacity grants the Performance 558km of range, the Quattro 542km of range, and the SQ6 568km of range, all measured to the WLTP standard.

The 800-volt architecture which forms part of the new PPE platform unlocks ultra-fast DC charging times, which are impressive given the size of the Q6 e-tron’s battery pack.

A claimed peak charging speed of 270kW will take the battery from 10 to 80 per cent in just 21 minutes if you can find a fast enough charger. Audi says the charging system is optimised to maintain its peak charging for as long as possible (something we’ll have the opportunity to test at a later date, although we’ve found these claims to ring reasonably true for the e-tron GT on the older J1 platform).

On a slower AC charger (the kind you might find at the local shops), the maximum charging speed is an acceptable 11kW, although the max rate of 22kW would be nice to see. At 11kW to charge from 10 to 100 per cent will take around eight hours. In an unusual touch, the Q6 gets a second AC charging port on the driver’s side to go with the AC/DC combo port on the passenger side.

Sadly, there’s no vehicle-to-load or vehicle-to-grid features for the Q6 e-tron range, particularly given the size of its battery pack. While you might not use these features initially, it would be good to have them long-term as more use-cases become apparent.

When it comes to energy efficiency the Q6 e-tron’s official numbers are 19kWh/100km for the Performance, 19.5kWh/100km for the Quattro, or 18.4kWh/100km for the SQ6. Interestingly, the SQ6 has the most impressive efficiency rating, which, according to Audi is due to the lower ride height and better aerodynamic performance afforded by the air suspension.

The consumption numbers are about on-par for a vehicle this size, but are far from impressive numbers I’ve seen in the real world on similarly sized rivals like the Ford Mustang Mach-E for example. As we were jumping in and out of vehicles on this launch, expect a more thorough real-world efficiency evaluation at a later date.

Hilariously, the official figure is 16.9L/100km. I doubled it without trying. Simple as that. If you're buying this car thinking it will be easy on the juice, you're insane.

Cheeringly, Lambo has at least tried, the V12 going silent when you sit at the lights, the best thing being the way it bursts back into life when you lift off the brake.

If you have the time available, it takes 90 litres of premium unleaded to fill the tank.

Here’s the thing, Audi has talked a big game about this new PPE platform, but from behind the wheel the Q6 e-tron doesn’t offer the kind of massive step change I was expecting. In fact, just one look at the car and I felt like I knew how it would drive, and it didn’t stray from this expectation.

The Q6 e-tron is defined by its balanced weight distribution, its sharp steering and the powerful follow-through its electric motor provides. It defies its weight in the corners, but at the same time its SUV body struggles to shake the sheer mass which remains present under the floor.

As a result, it doesn’t have the reactive athleticism of its combustion counterparts, instead offering a more sturdy feel of the road, bolstered by thick tyres. Still, no matter which variant you pick, you’re getting more power delivered more quickly than entry-level engines in the Q5 range, for example.

There’s something to be said for how exhilarating these can be. These new motors also don’t have the same disappointing hollowed-out acceleration feeling lesser MEB-based cars can have when it comes to overtaking manoeuvres.

And yet, there’s something disappointing about how the Q6 feels to drive. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a powerful Audi EV and nothing more, where some rivals, and even Audi’s own e-tron GT feel more like an absolute generational leap.

There’s more, too. Versions that don’t feature the acoustic glass had a surprising amount of road noise on coarse chip surfaces. I’d expect better for a premium car on a new platform, and the standard suspension had the odd jilted moment as it wrangled with the sheer weight of the Q6.

The air suspension package was a massive improvement on this, damping both noise levels and the undulations and imperfections the road can throw at you. It stood out to me as a very worthwhile option to have, even on base cars if you’re chasing the best handling and ride this platform has to offer.

The SQ6, featuring the lot, is of course an absolute monster of a car, with even more powerful acceleration, and the air suspension as standard, although on the road at least the additional power over the Quattro was hard to quantify. 

We didn’t have the chance to sample the base Performance at the launch. The rear-drive dynamics and lesser weight over the front axle as well as smaller wheel will make for a different feel compared to the Quattro and SQ6 we did drive, so we’re hoping we can bring you a review of this car at a later date.

In Strada or Street mode, awful. Everything is slow and doughy, particularly the gearshift which goes looking for a gear like dog looking for a stick you didn't throw, but instead hid behind your back. The low-speed ride is nothing less than terrible, fidgeting over every single lump and bump and is only slightly more appealing than being dragged along behind.

The gearbox is really the worst bit about it. Automotive history is littered with cars that laboured along with a single clutch semi-auto: Alfa Romeo 156, BMW's E60 M5 and today the Citroen Cactus is stuck with just such a dud transmission.

Like that old M5, however, there's a trick to making the gearbox work for you - show absolutely no mercy.

Switch the selector up to Sport, get off the highway or major arterial road and head for the hills. Or better still, a clear race track. Then the Aventador goes from a pain in the rear to a glorious, roaring, completely unhinged and unhinging battle cruiser. This car is all about the experience, from the second you lay eyes on it to the moment you put it to bed.

This isn't an everyday supercar and it's absurd to think Lamborghini thinks it is.

First up, there's the obvious entry point with those wacky doors. While it's tricky to get in, if you're under six feet and reasonably mobile, stick your backside in, keep your head down and you're in. If you've been clever, you've specified the glass engine cover so you can see out the back but the huge wing mirrors are surprisingly effective.

Has someone thoughtlessly parked the car in a tight spot? No trouble, the four wheel steer makes the car absurdly manoeuvrable given its extravagant length and width.

As we've already established, it's not much fun at low speeds, waiting until about 70km/h before things start to make a bit more sense. This isn't an everyday supercar and it's absurd to think Lamborghini thinks it is. It just isn't.

The old Aventador was not the most capable of machines but made up for it with its overall belligerence. The new S takes that aggro and dials it up. When you move the drive mode to Sport you are basically unleashing hell. You can pretend to be super-masculine and switch to Corsa (race) mode, but it's all about getting the car straight and getting you around the track in the most efficient way possible. Sport is where it's at if you want to have fun.

The Aventador is about being seen, but not before you've been heard - from two postcodes away. It really is utterly glorious when you have a stretch of road to yourself. The V12 revs furiously to its 8400rpm redline and the wallop of the upshift is accompanied with a fantastic bark and a burst of blue flame. And these aren't the best bits.

Approach a corner, stomp on the colossal carbon ceramic brakes and the exhaust erupts in a combination of bangs and pops and growls that puts a smile on even the most hardened car-hater's face. The fact it steers into corners with just a demure roll of the wrist, aided and abetted by that funky four-wheel steering system. It's just brilliant, addictive and truth be told, it gets under your skin.

The Aventador doesn't have an ANCAP safety rating but the carbon chassis also comes with four airbags, ABS, stability and traction controls.

The usual five-year and unlimited-kilometre warranty applies to the Q6 e-tron, alongside six years of roadside assistance and an industry-standard eight-year or 160,000km battery warranty.

Additionally, Audi throws in one year of a Chargefox subscription, theoretically making your first 12 months of fast DC charging free (provided Chargefox administers your local charging infrastructure).

At the time of writing, Audi was yet to provide service pricing, but the interval is nice and long, at 24 months or 30,000km. A pre-paid service package covering six years and 90,000km comes in at just $2080 which is super affordable for a car from a traditional luxury brand, even if it only covers the first three workshop visits.

In an unexpected twist, you'll get a three-year/100,000km warranty and the option to increase to four years ($11,600!) or five years ($22,200!)(!). Having recovered from typing that, given the cost of something going wrong, that's probably money well-spent.