Jaguar I-Pace vs. Audi E-Tron GT – How Electric Cars Are Evolving

I was one of the launch analysts for the Jaguar I-Pace and owned both a 2019 and 2022 HSE and truly enjoyed the car. But I just noticed that my old 2019 is under a full recall and you have to go in to have your charging capacity reduced by 20% to prevent the car from catching on fire while charging and they also highly recommend you don’t charge the car in your garage which is problematic for most of us.

The later designed Audi E-Tron GT has been, in comparison, problem free though the forum does indicate there have been some battery problems, many the common problem which the I-Pace shares, of using a 12-volt battery which is good for around 2 years to make the car work rather than using the propulsion battery for everything.

Let’s talk about my experiences with both cars, both positive and negative.

Jaguar I-Pace

This was the car that really convinced me that if the battery issues could be solved gas cars couldn’t compete. Being the first Jaguar electric car it did have a number of initial teething problems, like the second day I had the brand new 2019 the AV system catastrophically failed, the car had to be trailered 180 miles to the closest dealer (no loaner) and I was without the car for several weeks as they figured out what was wrong with the software. The second time this car failed was after sitting for a week in an airport parking lot one of the electrical modules failed catastrophically and the car again had to be towed 180 miles, but the tow truck driver screwed up in loading the car, damaged the battery pack requiring a $100K fix and at that time the car was only worth around $50K totaling out the car. 

The 2019 had an older charging system that wouldn’t take a flex level 2 charger or make use of anything over 150KW (they go upwards of 450 KW now), and the 2022 was a little but not much better.

Other than these two major problems, the car was trouble free, and I replaced it with a 2022 (pandemic car) which lacked one of the features I really enjoyed, dynamic mode, and the cross-traffic alert and avoidance system which could have prevented the accident that totaled that car out (a truly sad day).

The car’s range was around 240 miles, but the estimates were all over the map and there was one time where I ran out of battery as I was rolling into my garage, a closer call than I’d ever want to experience again.

I really enjoyed driving the car, however, it was very planted, seemed to corner like it was on rails, and while it did a 4 second 0-60, which was the same as my Mercedes AMG track car, that incredible torque from 0 allowed me to be the king of the stop light race crowd. And the dynamic mode, which was in the first not the second car, would not only make the car’s launch more pronounced it put the driver’s instrument cluster into a kind of combat mode. (When folks rudely cut me off, rather than flipping them off, I’d go into dynamic, pretend I had machine guns, and deal with my aggravation non-violently).

The 2019 had interesting features that the 2022 lacked like an activity band you could wear and use instead of a key to access the car (say if you were at the beach and didn’t want to deal with keys). After I lost the 2022, I bought a 2019 Audi TTS, but I really missed the performance of the electric and I really don’t like going to gas stations, so I flipped for the 2022 Audi E-Tron GT.

Audi E-Tron GT

My initial Jaguar I-Pace HSE priced out at just under $100k, while the 2022 HSE was used and had a price of $75K (which was the same as a new one but, thanks to the pandemic, I couldn’t get a new one in a reasonable time). The Audi E-Tron GT cost $126K when new, but two years old with 20K miles I got it for around $56K or the least cost of any of the electric cars I’d bought.

It is a sedan configuration which isn’t as useful, and the I-Pace’s SUV build but it is as good or better looking and I get more people complimenting me on the car than I did with the I-Pace (though folks commented on it as well). Both cars are unusual enough that I seldom saw another and I is fun having a car that no one else seems to have.

So far, the E-Tron GT has been troubling free and what I like about the car is that while it is only a little faster to 60 than my I-Pace it hits like a hammer in the back. I’ve never had a car hit so hard at launch. It also has, when I is in dynamic mode, a 50HP boost that last for around 10 seconds, and I have the lowest performance version of the car with all of the toys (including rear wheel steering which makes the car a dream to maneuver in tight spaces).

It has heated and cooled seats and it is my first car with a massage function, which is more like a massage chair in use and not just vibration. It has double-glazed windows keeping the car quieter though road noise does still make it into the cabin and the sound system is in line with the Meridian System that Jaguar used so all of the cars had decent AV (the 2019 I-Pace used a very slow system that was fixed by the time the 2022 came out).

The E-Tron will take a Flex charger and will work with chargers up to 350 KW which leads to much faster charging both at home and on the road. I should add that the new E-Tron GT in my configuration has 100 more HP, and the new topline E-Tron Performance has 1,000 HP making it wicked fast but also extremely expensive (and out of my price range, and I’m pretty sure, 1,000 HP would kill me).

Wrapping Up: Getting Better Fast

The Audi is, from an experience and reliability standpoint, better than the Jaguar largely because Audi, at the time my E-Tron was built, had learned how to do electric cars (and it uses the same platform as the Porsche Taycan) making for a better experience over the Jaguar. But the next electric Jaguars should be far better since they’ll embody what Jaguar has now learned.

This progress suggests that next-generation cars of which the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is one of the first, should be even better still and that companies are slowly learning how to build electric cars right. My current advice is not to buy an electric new but after 2 years get a certified pre-owned car as those typically come with an extra year of warranty (which is what I did).

Then you end up, also like I did, with a $126K car that is still like new for well under half price and they don’t seem to depreciate much after that initial drop. Electric cars are getting better faster now, wait until you see what is coming in the second half of the decade when we finally get the batteries we’ve always needed.

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst covering automotive technology and battery developments at Torque News. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia, and follow his articles on Forbes, on X, and Linkedin.