This 815hp Audi EV Is Literally Gran Turismo Made Real

Your eyes do not deceive you: this new, outlandish Audi racer isn't CGI, or a teaser for the PlayStation 5's graphical talents. In fact, it's a full-sized, fully functional, and very, very powerful real life version of the Audi e-tron Vision Gran Turismo.

That car was first designed for the PlayStation 4 game, of course, and never with a physical version in mind. Sniffing a Formula E promotion in the making, however, Audi's engineers were given the task of taking the Gran Turismo car and building it for real. In doing so, it's an Audi first.

The automaker has made physical versions of its in-game cars before, though only as full-scale models. The e-tron Vision Gran Turismo, however, needed to actually drive, since Audi wanted to use it as a race taxi at Formula E events. That meant it couldn't just creep around like the typical low-power show car concept might.

All the same, we're not entirely sure Audi's team needed to go quite as far as they did – even if we're not arguing. The e-tron Vision Gran Turismo is fully-electric, with a trio of motors: each has 200 kW of power. Two are on the rear axle, while a third is on the front. In total, it gives the car a whopping 815 horsepower – considerably more, you might note, than even the most powerful R8 V10 in the company's production car line-up.

With a curb weight of just 3,197 pounds, meanwhile, and a 50:50 weight distribution between the front and the rear, it makes for a ridiculously fast EV. Indeed, Audi claims that the e-tron Vision Gran Turismo will do 0-62 mph in under 2.5 seconds. Permanent quattro all-wheel drive is, unsurprisingly, standard.

Notably, the components for this one-off electric car's drivetrain have their roots in production vehicles. The motors are taken directly from the upcoming Audi e-tron, an all-electric SUV that the automaker hopes to have in dealerships by the end of the year. Sadly it's unlikely to be quite as powerful as this particular concept car, but the e-tron Vision Gran Turismo will inspire future Audi EVs in other ways.

"This car incorporates numerous elements of our new design language such as the inverted single frame in the vehicle's color that will be typical for our new e-tron models," Marc Lichte, chief designer at Audi, says. "Although the design of a virtual vehicle allows much greater freedom and the creation of concepts which are only hard to implement in reality, we did not want to put a purely fictitious concept on wheels. Our aim was a fully functional car."

In total, it took Lichte and the team at Audi's pre-production center eleven months to take the game car from purely digital to race track ready. Even if, when it gets to Rome and the Formula E race on April 14, it'll only be doing taxi duties rather than screaming around the track.