In the years ahead, our first instinctive act when we climb into our electric cars will be to check the available range in the battery pack.
It will soon become as commonplace as putting on a seatbelt because as we all know, that digital readout will be a huge determinant as to whether what is stored will carry us to our planned destination. Or we'll have a long coffee stop somewhere along the way.
In our time-poor contemporary epoch, even the fastest recharge times are simply not fast enough when we're all accustomed to dropping into the nearest servo for a five-minute fill-up of good old fossil fuels.
In the case of the latest all-electric premium offering on the Australian market, the Audi e-tron 55, the range on a full overnight charge is exactly 383 kilometres.
The new Audis are priced from $137,100 (excluding on-roads) but that won't get you a full 383 kilometres of range because that price applies to the entry-level 50 model, which has 27 battery modules. The more expensive 55 model has the much-preferred, anxiety-depleting 36.
So the question then, for those ready to enter the premium electric market, is whether to spend the extra $11,000 to extract the maximum range they can. Most, we suspect, will push the budget.
Range anxiety in an electric car is a very real concern and it's an ongoing conundrum for all manufacturers now beginning to roll out their latest products.
Tesla has a head start, but the established brands such as VW, Audi, Ford and General Motors are racing to catch up. Toyota is sitting in its own hybrid vehicle "bubble" and doing quite nicely.
The Audi, as you'd expect, has a very premium driving feel and cabin ambience compared with the Tesla S, but has nowhere near the range of the US vehicle.
What it does have, as a slight advantage, is that it can recharge up to 80 per cent of its battery pack in around 30 minutes on a fast-charger. That's better than most, but still not brilliant. However, watch this space, because the Germans' performance model, the GT, is coming next year and is tipped to be the fastest-charging EV on the planet.
There's a lot of clever tech and some 22 litres of coolant constantly being pumped around under your feet as you drive the e-tron, with the power fed to motors on either axle.
It's deliciously quiet, with a barely noticeable throbby hum as you light off, rather quickly. One of the features we've covered before but are still worth mentioning is the exterior wing mirror cameras, which sit out like Dalek stalks and send the rear-view image to a small screen on each door, just near the latch.
Sadly, they're optional and cost $3500. But they offer a genuinely superior rear view in iffy driving conditions, such as the drizzle and rain we experienced.
Standard on the Audi is air suspension on both axles. It allows for multiple ride settings and makes changing a flat very easy (shades of the Citroen DS from 50 years ago), although the priority for the premium suspension was to provide the best possible cushioning for the underfloor battery pack.
E-tron buyers will get six years' free charging through the Chargefox network, and during the car's launch period, a free wall charger installed at home. The cars all have an eight-year/160,000-kilometre battery warranty.
The feel-good factor in all this is that Greenpower energy providers, such as the Capital Wind Farm out near Tarago, are signed up by Audi to provide all the recharging power.
These e-trons, in sportback or SUV form, are just the first pegs in the EV ground for Audi. The company's battery tech is scalable, which will bring larger and smaller models into the mix.
