The 2025 Audi RS E-Tron GT Is the Q-Ship GOAT: First Drive Review

A Japanese shinkansen travels at 200 miles per hour in a smooth, serene silence. Onboard, a salaryman brims his beer glass without worry that a single drop of Sapporo will spill.

That’s the 2025 Audi RS E-Tron GT Performance, a glass-smooth bullet train rolling on Pirelli rubber. 

Much has changed since the first iteration of the E-Tron GT bowed in 2020, even if its exterior looks only subtly different. Side-by-side, it’s apples-to-apples. The new car receives a more-rounded shape overall, with slight tweaks now separating the capstone RS E-Tron GT Performance (tested here) from its lesser S E-Tron GT brother.

Still, the E-Tron GT’s body looks sleeker than a French disco; It’s the best-looking EV on the market, bar none. More characterful than a Tesla. Sharper than a Lucid. Prettier than any Mercedes.

The RS E-Tron GT’s interior looks great too, if not as breathtaking as the car’s gorgeous skin. Only a few niggles appeared after a three-hour road drive in the mountain roads near Vegas, pointed out and harped on by my co-driver, Matt Farah of The Smoking Tire podcast. 

Pros: Absurd Power, Glass-Smooth Active Suspension, Killer Looks

Complaint number one: Flimsy little plastic handles actuate the doors from the inside. Complaints two and three: Touch-capacitive touch buttons (2), the squared-off steering wheel (3). 

These complaints are peanuts, of course, but there are precious few things you’re guaranteed to touch every time you drive a car; the steering wheel and the door handle are two of them. It’s those little swipes of frosting that separate the merely great from the divine. At this price point, every single component in the vehicle’s interior should flatter its driver. 

Even the door handle.

Photo by: Audi

Photo by: Audi

Outside those tiny pain points, this interior feels as premium as its roughly $190,000 as-tested price demands, though still a step down from more-sumptuous offerings from The Brits.

Full marks to Audi’s designers for the huge strakes of “forged-carbon” trim pieces that split the dash into upper and lower segments, however. It’s a gorgeous little visual touch, the material borrowed from those mile-wide spoilers perched atop Lamborghini’s raunchiest track cars. But inside this Audi, forged carbon adds a splash of texture without leaning on dowdy wood grain or entirely predictable woven-carbon panels. 

But mostly it’s the interior’s quietude that transmits a sense of quality. On good asphalt the cabin is whisper-silent, save a pinch of whine from the e-tron GT’s two permanent-magnet synchronous motors. 

The motors kick out 912 horsepower to all four wheels, courtesy of 105.0 kilowatt-hour of 800-volt lithium-ion batteries capable of charging at 320 kilowatts, with quick charging from 10 to eighty percent in just 18 minutes. 

It’s a frankly deranged horsepower figure, almost incongruous with the experience of actually driving the car with your foot matted flat. In a word, I’d describe the RS E-Tron GT Performance as “effortless.” (If only Audi would apply such pithy nomenclature instead of its word-salad model names).

Photo by: Audi

After about 25 minutes of shooting the breeze with Farah in the E-Tron GT, when we’d finally escaped the humdrum single-file traffic on the outskirts of Vegas, I looked down at the speedometer. The gap between the number on the dash and my own perception of our speed shocked me.

Short of a bullet train, you’ll never hit deep triple-digits with more detachment from the fizzing sensation of speed. The RS E-Tron GT simply glides. 105 feels like 55. 55 feels like 25. The world arrives at three-quarter speed. You survey the horizon, loping toward you over that sculpted hood, warping to a blur at the edges of your periphery as the e-tron GT’s wide mesh grille gulps down the horizon.

Photo by: Audi

Cons: Not Engaging To Drive, Some Cheap Interior Materials

If that sounds exactly like the detachment you’ve avoided in your own cars, you are not alone. But it’s exactly what an EV super sedan like this should do; Rather than replicate or imitate the sensations of an equivalent ICE vehicle, Audi’s EV Übersedan does what only a battery-powered car of this quality can. It delivers mind-bending speed and up to 278 miles of range with an attitude bordering disinterest. 

I loved it. 

Much of that languid, long-legged capability is owed to the E-Tron GT’s optional active suspension, which pairs with carbon-ceramic brakes in an $11,000 “dynamic plus” package. If you’re going to spring for this car, the active suspension is not an option. It’s a requirement. 

Photo by: Audi

Photo by: Audi

Photo by: Audi

Motor1’s own Chris Perkins has covered active suspension tech more thoroughly than most, so I’ll link to a couple of stories here and here. But basically, a separate hydraulic pump connects to each one of the car’s dampers via high-pressure lines, using a pair of valves on the shock body to rapidly adjust its rebound and compression curves in real time, eliminating roll and pitch from the e-tron GT’s body. 

Crucially, this is not a passive system like those found on other cars. These other systems–no matter how sophisticated—reactively adjust to suspension moments, firming or slackening the shock fluid in the fractional seconds after you’ve turned hard into a corner.

Photo by: Audi

Audi’s active system pressurizes the shock via a hydraulic pump to offset forces acting against the shock—actively, reactively, and proactively—in order to eliminate body roll entirely. The system can even pitch the car forward/backward or roll it side-to-side in anticipation of a corner, leaning the car into the apex like a motorcyclist. 

This is a simplification of the system, of course. Sensors and computers and components at every corner of the car work in harmony to make this active suspension work seamlessly, but describing the sensation of the system working is far harder than describing the nuts and bolts of the tech itself.

It’s brain-melting stuff.

Photo by: Audi

An empty race track allowed us to activate and deactivate the system in back-to-back runs, alternating flat-foot acceleration and threshold braking until the straight gave way to a set of fluid and surprisingly interesting corners at Speed Vegas’s mile-ish-long track. 

Through these flowing corners, the active suspension had me cackling in disbelief as the E-Tron GT sliced past apexes and over curbing with a totally flat cornering attitude. Audi was keen to remind us that active suspension is a comfort feature, not go-fast tech. Could’ve fooled me. 

Photo by: Audi

Photo by: Audi

Still, this is not a track car. It weighs too much and it’d chew through tires in no time. But damn if it wasn’t fun to whip the e-tron GT through a few tight corners to find the (surprisingly high) limits of the active suspension’s capability.

Would the sensation dull, in time? On a track, certainly. On the road, just cruising or commuting? Never. There’s few sections of roadway where you’d leave the system off.

After our brief track shakedown of the suspension tech, I caught lead engineer Stephan Reil standing near the car, a smoldering cigarette perched between his fingers. Reil helmed the engineering effort for every great Audi you’ve lusted after in the past 25 years, from the early RS6s, through the R8, and now this silent-assassin EV.

Photo by: Audi

I asked Reil how Audi tuned roll into the active suspension’s ragged limits, reminded him of a conversation we once had about the curiously positioned coolant overflow reservoir in the V-10 RS6, and finished with a simple question. 

Is this EV stuff as fun to develop as those wacky, bombastic old Audis?

“It’s the most powerful, fastest accelerating Audi ever,” Reil said with a shrug, waving his cigarette at the car and echoing verbatim the tagline posted on the Audi PowerPoint from earlier in the day. His point became self-evident.

Photo by: Audi

Reil was as excited to discuss this RS e-tron GT Performance as any of the litany of powerhouses which came before. Of that I’m sure. But this car’s performance is perhaps the least-interesting thing about the car. More interesting: How the Audi does all those numbers without a fuss. 

But the most interesting thing, as Dennis Reynolds would say, is the implication. 

The existence of active suspension in Audi’s flagship EV suggests the possibility of a trickle down the family tree. Whenever democratization of this tech reaches something as pedestrian as, say, the fabulous Audi Q6 I reviewed last year, I’ll be first in line. 

Until then, the Audi RS e-tron GT Performance stands as a monument to easy speed. Fast as a barreling shinkansen and just as quietly assured. 

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Source: Audi