ELECTRIC VEHICLES

Ken Block's $20M Audi EV Ad

https://youtu.be/SO2Li9BMQp8

The 11th instalment of Ken Block’s Gymkhana series was launched this week, taking to the streets of Las Vegas with an extremely cool Audi EV homage to the original Quattro S1 Sport. The car reportedly cost $12M and they closed down the Las Vegas Strip for filming. One hundred Toyo R888 tires were sacrificed for the short film, three times as many as used in other Gymkhana videos. This owing to the 6000 NM (4,400 lb/ft) of torque at the axles produced from the twin 250kW Formula E motors and single-speed reduction gearing. The car lights up the tires to 100km/hr from standstill - then waits for the rest of the car to catch up. The car may as well have Teflon tires running on polished concrete soaked with WD-40

Audi ‘S1 e-tron quattro Hoonitron’ was displayed at this year's Monterey Historics in August. It is a bespoke, one-of-one carbon fibre EV designed by Audi Sport for Ken Block to use for Electrikhana. It was designed and built in the amazingly short timeframe of 9 months, using many off-the-shelf components from Audi and Audi Motorsport. They asked him not to crash it.

I’m not sure what the total cost of Electrikhana was, but $20M is probably not far off. For that Audi (and sponsors) can bank on at least 50M YouTube views, and Audi gains a halo car for their E-Tron brand. In contrast, a Super Bowl ad costs something like $6M, reaches a 100M audience, but disappears after 30sec. So Electrikhana is expensive, but they have a lot more opportunity to amortize the costs over time, with a physical item and possibly a virtual one.

I’m sure Playstation would love to get their hands on the Hoonitron. If you were trying to get a younger generation sold on the idea that electric cars are cool, letting Sony's Polyphony digitize the car would be a good way to do it.

It is impressive that they were able to put electricity into the car fast enough, given the rate at which they were using it. Audi brought along a portable 800V DC fast charger that can presumably charge at the same rate as the Electrify Canada fast chargers (270kW). With about 70kWh of storage from the four Audi Q7 PHEV batteries, and recharging at 30% when they said performance started to fall off, they would have been able to replenish 40kWh in under 10 minutes (40kWh/270kW x 60 = 9 min). Using all of the 500kW of power would give about half that amount of time in tire smoke (40kWh/500kW x 60 = 4.8 min). Fast enough as to not slow down filming, which when you are shutting down traffic on the Las Vegas strip, would have been an important design objective.

I'm actually writing this column from Las Vegas, next to where Electrikhana was shot. I'm here for the Las Vegas Concours d'Elegance which is turning out to be a nice weekend. I'm sorry I missed the production, but I'm going to see if I can find the tire marks they left behind!