Don’t Get Too Attached To This Larger Allroad

As an American living in Italy, there are often entire month-long stretches where I drive nothing but European cars that will sadly never come out to play on American soil. Such is the case for the abundantly adored Audi A6 Allroad Quattro seen here. I was initially of the premise that since the A4 Allroad had already been confirmed for the U.S. that the A6 Allroad would be coming as well, but I am dismayed to report otherwise.

Such a pity, too. The business case for giving North America the whole range of Audi models that Germany offers obviously just doesn’t pan out financially – and for some of us, it’s the old predictable story of unrequited love across the chilly Atlantic.

Team Ingolstadt brought me into their home in Neckarsulm just north of hilly Stuttgart for this drive through the area’s precisely cultivated fields of hops. The smell of beer is everywhere here, which may go some way toward explaining just why the new A6 Allroad felt so good under and around me as we freight-trained along the Swabian two-lanes.

Audi knows sound, and it wants its upcoming plug-in cars to have as distinctive a grumble as possible, just like its fossil-fuel-burning brethren. That’s why Audi engineers are working on “new sound signatures” for future e-tron models. You can tell how seriously Audi is taking this by the way it references the sounds a car makes to music and “emotional sound structures” in the press release below.

The stated reason for entirely this e-sound work is so pedestrians will be capable to hear the near-silent EVs, but you could just use whatever old beep to meet that requirement. Audi wants something a bit more refined, to stand out from the space-y blips that the Nissan Leaf puts out or the Volkswagen E-Golf’s child Wookiee growl.

Scroll down to see a video of the Audi e-sound in progress. In its current form, the sound changes based on what the e-tron is doing. It comes out of a speaker blasting up to 40 watts that is attached to the bottom of the car.

Of course, the question from some blind-advocacy groups is whether having each EV make its own sound is reasonable, or if there should be one “EV sound” that entirely battery-powered cars are required to emit to tell those with limited sight “a car is nearby.” In the U.S., the laws governing EV sounds are not yet set, but some sort of low-speed warning requirement seems to be coming.

Audi’s client racing program with the R8 LMS has been an unequivocal success. Since the delivery of the first race car in March of 2010, more than 40 examples have competed in 18 different championships worldwide, racking up more than 100 victories. In 2011 the R8 LMS captured important wins at the 24 hour races at Spa and Zolder, as well as claiming a GT3 class victory at the Nürburgring 24 Hours. Most recently the R8 LMS won the Bathurst 12 Hour race in Australia for the second year in a row.

One of the places the R8 LMS hasn’t had a big impact, though, is here in the United States. For 2012, Audi did finally homologate a version of the race car for Grand-Am, but it’s a version that’s significantly changed from the model that competes in the European GT3 series. The aerodynamics of the car are less aggressive to meet Grand-Am standards, the 5.2-liter V10 is detuned by around 75 horsepower, and driver aids like ABS and traction control have been removed.

With the R8′s success in motorsports internationally, Audi has hinted that it is currently looking at expending the car’s presence to other racing series stateside. One man, James Sofronas, isn’t waiting around for the good folks at Ingolstadt to take action, though. He got his hands on a pair of GT3-spec R8 LMS race cars and is in the process of homologating them for a racing series here in the United States. He recently invited us to take a closer look at the R8 LMS and learn more around the car’s domestic racing future.