Audi has been developing high performance electric cars during the past couple of years and it seems they have arrived at some solid results as they decided to show off an electric variant of the R8 supercar at 2010 Le Mans, the race that they won with a historic 1-2-3 finish. The car uses Audi’s e-tron platform which has been featured in a couple of concept cars before.

This system is actually very clever and instead of using one electric motor for the whole car, it comes with four separate motors each powering one of the wheels. Like so you also get 4-wheel-drive! It’s also very high on power as this R8 e-tron delivers 313 hp, but it’s even capable of developing over 1000 hp and insane amount of torque.

So as far performance matters the R8 e-tron, which will hit the market as a production model in 2012, won’t disappoint as it does 0-100 km/h in 4.8 seconds. But it has the same problem as all other electric cars which is the limited range and very long charging time. As soon as those issues are addressed the world is ready to embrace the EV!