Quick Take: One Good and One Bad Feature of the 2025 Audi Q6 e-tronQuick Take: One Good and One Bad Feature of the 2025 Audi Q6 e-tron
This luxurious crossover EV is good sporty fun to drive.

At a Glance
- The $76,790 2025 Audi Q6 e-tron has a 100-kilowatt-hour battery pack rated for 295 miles of driving range.
- The optional Prestige Package includes the panoramic sunroof, augmented reality HUD, and adaptive cruise control.
Driving the $76,790 Audi Q6 e-tron is pretty similar to previous Audi EVs we’ve tested, so it was no surprise to find that it is an enjoyable ride. Audi's augmented reality head-up display remains an impressive technology that you can't help noticing.
Two other things stood out to me, one that I liked and one that I didn’t. I’ll start with the mistake.
For the Q6 e-tron, Audi has installed a control panel in the driver's door that handles functions that you don’t expect to find relegated to the door. The switches for the headlights and the fog lights are there, and it is the first time I can remember ever seeing that location for those functions.
Because the headlights are normally left in the “automatic” position, there is little reason to worry about where that switch is for most drivers, so that isn’t a big deal. Fog lights are mostly an unnecessary decoration and that is especially the case for a vehicle like the Q6, which has superlative headlights that don’t need augmentation.
But Audi also moved the door lock switches to this small panel from the previous position high on the door, right next to the door release handle. That’s not only right where you’d expect the lock button to be, but it is in plain view there, making it easy to find quickly.

How is anyone supposed to use this tiny switch panel while driving? The proper location of the door lock switch is visible at the top right, next to the door release handle. DAN CARNEY
Instead, there’s a blank insert there, where the lock buttons used to be. On the passenger’s side door, that’s where they still are, taunting the driver with their ease of use in comparison to the annoyingly tiny and harder-to-find-in-a-hurry buttons.
That’s not all. The Q6 has buttons on the bottom of this panel to enable the child locks on the rear doors. There are separate buttons for the left and right sides so they can be activated individually.
But these switches are capacitive touch and they are at the bottom of this switch panel, right next to the horizontal row of switches on the door’s armrest that control the car’s four windows. Feel for those switches and it is easy to brush the capacitive touch rear door child locks. When you arrive at your destination, your rear-seat passengers complain that they can’t get out, and you aren’t sure why or what to do about it because you didn’t intentionally activate the child locks.
This whole panel is full of irritating unforced errors that any designer should know to avoid. There is surely a story of company politics responsible for this, with a frustrated Audi employee gesticulating and saying “I told you so.” But there it is.

The driver's side charge port, with the DC fast-charging connector beneath the Level 2 AC port. DAN CARNEY
But Audi has also provided the Q6 e-tron with a good feature. Like other e-trons, the Q6 has two charging ports, one on the right side and one on the left. This makes wrestling a charging cord into position much easier, without worrying about which side contains the port. Previous e-trons have located these charge ports in the front fenders, near the front doors, but the Q6 has them in the rear fenders. With a port on each side, this doesn’t seem to make much difference.

The right-side charge port. Notice the weather sealing on the inside of the door, which eliminates the need for an internal plug on the port. DAN CARNEY
Unfortunately, as with those earlier models, the Q6 e-tron only has one port that connects to SAE Combined Charging System DC fast chargers, so when you’re making a pit stop at a public fast charger, you’ll have to jockey the car into position so that the cable can reach the driver’s side port.
These ports have power-operated doors covering them that you can activate from the driver’s seat, providing a head start on plugging in the cable, which is handy when you plug in upon arrival at home or work every day. Even better, the covers have weather sealing, so there’s no separate plug over the port behind the door that you have to fiddle with each time. This is how it should be done.
So, there’s some good and some bad to consider here, neither significant enough to sway a purchase decision, but worth being aware of.
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