This Audi EV Set A Guinness World Record By Driving 831 Miles Without Recharging

That's an astonishing average efficiency of 8.76 miles per kWh.

Photo by: Audi

By: Nico DeMattia

Sep 24, at 2:23pm ET

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Audi set a new Guinness World Record for the longest distance traveled in an electric car on a single charge.
The Audi A6 E-Tron went 831 miles without recharging.
The test happened in "regular traffic," but Audi didn't share the average speed.

The latest world record for the longest drive on a single charge didn't come from a Lucid, or Tesla, or even that funky new Volkswagen thing. Nope, it came from an ordinary Audi A6 E-Tron, the automaker announced on Thursday. Rally driver Miko Marczyk was the one behind the wheel, and he had to go all the way to Hel and back to do it. Hel, Poland, that is.

Marczyk set out in a standard Audi A6 e-tron Sportback on September 11 at 1:55 a.m, and drove it across Poland. The route snaked along the Vistula river to Hel, which sits on a peninsula in the Baltic Sea. He then turned around and came back. On just one charge, his A6 E-Tron Sportback covered 831 miles, making for an average efficiency of 7.09 kWh per 100 km (8.76 miles per kWh). The total drive took 45 hours, with an average ambient temperature of around 15 degrees Celsius.

Last year, Lucid claimed the Guinness World Record for the longest drive in an EV, covering 749 miles from Switzerland to Germany. The Air Grand Touring used in that test is America's rangiest EV, with an EPA rating north of 500 miles.

Photo by: Audi

Audi doesn't say what his average speed was, only saying that he drove the car in "regular traffic." As with any of these ultra-long EV range tests, we can only assume that slow speeds played a role. Cruising at highway speeds, there's no way the E-Tron would have gone this far. Same goes for the Lucid or the Chevy Silverado EV that GM engineers drove over a thousand miles.

Audi credits this efficiency to aerodynamics. With a drag coefficient of 0.21, the A6 E-Tron is one of the slipperier cars on the market and the most aerodynamic Audi ever. Audi also says that aerodynamic drag accounts for 40% of its electric A6's consumption, so its slippery shape helped it maintain efficiency at higher speeds.

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Even with the Audi's pebble-smooth aerodynamics and its 94.9 kWh usable battery, Marczyk was shocked by the results. "Even for me, a result of 1,338 kilometers was a pleasant surprise," he said. It wasn't some slowpoke version of the car, either. It had 367 horsepower and could hit 62 mph in 5.4 seconds, the same as an off-the-shelf A6.

Does this mean you can achieve 800 miles-plus on a single charge with your Audi A6 E-Tron? Probably not. Marczyk was driving specifically to eke out every single mile possible, and was probably driving far too slow for the average highway driver to handle. Still, it proves that with a careful right foot and some patience, you can get some serious range out of a single charge.