There’s one problem though. The e-tron SUV has a 95 kWh battery, but only 204 miles (328 km) of range, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s rating announced on April 5. Tesla’s SUV, the Model X, has a 238-mile range with a 75 kWh battery, and has a range of 289 miles with a 100 kWh battery.
“Something doesn’t add up,” says Venkat Viswanathan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
Audi isn’t the first victim of Viswanathan’s calculations. In 2017, when Tesla announced its planned heavy-duty, long-range truck (called the Semi), he did the math and found out it’d be impossible to make an electric truck that can go 600 miles on a single charge, which is the average driving distance for such vehicles. And indeed, when Tesla announced the range for the Semi, both models had a range of less than 500 miles.
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