Audi e-tron GT is an impressive all-electric sports sedan. And even though it undercuts the price of its Porsche Taycan sibling the Audi is not exactly cheap. In fact, the one you see here stickered at $110K. So, even if one is damaged in a flood, you really don’t want to give up on it. It is worth trying everything to get it running and driving again. And that is exactly what YouTuber Rich Benoit from the Rich Rebuilds channel has done. We have shown you previously that he was miraculously able to get the flooded e-tron GT running again by using the old-fashioned rice trick. After submerging the car in thousands of pounds of rice the e-tron GT started and moved under its own power. Truly an impressive result.
However, starting and rolling forward 6 inches is one thing. To prove that the rice trick is truly viable the car has to actually behave like a car. Benoit still paid $56K at auction to get this car. And while that is far less than the original MSRP, it is still a serious chunk of change. And for that kind of money the car still needs to do all the things that an e-tron GT is capable of doing. That means driving at highway speeds, acceleration runs, and most importantly donuts in an empty parking lot. Once that road test is complete it is taken to an Audi dealer for inspection. Is the Audi really free of defects now? Let’s find out.
The ages-old rice trick doesn’t just work for smartphones, apparently – it also helped get this flooded Audi e-tron running again.
For many years now, an old wive’s tale has existed that suggests submerging a flooded electronic device – such as a smartphone – in rice will help suck the moisture out of it and make it good as new again. There are many that will tell you that this isn’t true, but also instances where it has worked, with some even saying that the dust from the rice can do more damage than good. Regardless, that didn’t stop YouTuber Rich Benoit of Rich Rebuilds fame from trying this ages-old trick on an entire car – a flood damaged Audi e-tron, to be specific.
Benoit purchased his Audi e-tron from a Copart auction just a few weeks ago with grand plans of restoring it back to new, a tall task – even for someone that’s already done precisely the same with with a flooded Tesla Model S (which he daily drove for years) and a Model X. But ripping those cars apart and spending countless hours bringing them back to life was one heck of a chore. And thus, Benoit figured, perhaps submerging the e-tron in 4.200 pounds of rice might actually speed up this process.
While some would wonder why anyone would buy such a heavily damaged vehicle in the first place, well, it’s all about value. Benoit paid a mere $56,000 for this 2,600-mile “gem,” which is roughly half its original MSRP of $110k. What he got, however, was a total wreck – a car that isn’t running or driving, and features water stains everywhere, along with a heaping helping of salt from the ocean waters that once filled every crack and crevice following a hurricane.
Once Benoit and his crew managed to get the e-tron powered up, it lit up like a literal Christmas tree, with the most concerning faults related to the car’s high-voltage battery system and pretty much everything else that makes it tick. Thus, before Benoit set out to spend a ton of money and replace all of these faulty components – or, at the very least, clean them up – he figured why not capture the attention of the internet and try the old fashioned rice trick?
Benoit and his team built a giant box to park the Audi in, wrapped it in a tarp, dumped rice on top of it, and waited for a few days to see what might happen. When some time had passed, they had to vacuum all of that rice out, but the results of all that work were simply amazing – the car actually ran and drove after the rice was removed, albeit with many fault codes still flashing on the gauge cluster. Regardless, it’s a pretty incredible result, and one that we would have never imagined could work on an entire car – not that we’re about to try and replicate this little science experiment ourselves.
