Once again I’ve listened to the little worm in my brain that tells me to fiddle with my already-nearly-perfect daily driver. It’s a very persuasive worm. This time it told me that my Audi A3 E-Tron needed a black honeycomb grille to replace the be-chromed factory fitment, as well as a pair of matching brake ducts and a pair of Hella driving lights mounted right on the bumper. I took a couple nice winter afternoons and blasted my little hybrid apart to appease the worm. The worm is pleased.
In case you needed a reminder what the front bumper of this car looked like before, this is how it looked when I bought it. I’ve previously discussed how much of an anti-chrome person I am, so obviously this much shiny on the front of the car simply would not do. And if I’m going to take the bumper off and do some grille work, this would be a good time to install some big driving lights to complete the rally car aesthetic I’m going for.
Knowing it would need some serious modification to fit the E-Tron’s four-rings badge charging port door I ordered up a brand new S3-style mesh grille and matching brake duct grilles. Not only would this make the car look a bit more aggressive without the cutesy chrome, but it ditches the integrated Euro-style front plate bracket that looks like a nudity censor bar. Yeah, it’s probably marginally aerodynamically less efficient, but sometimes we have to suffer for our art.
At least half of the time spent on this project was removing the factory bumper. A couple of buried bolts really ruined my day and my arms are still bruised from digging shoulder-deep in each side to release the damn thing. It might have been easier, in retrospect, to remove both front wheels and wheel well liners for access.
Once it was off the factory grille was easily removed and swapped for the new one. If this car weren’t a hybrid, this would have been the end of the story and the whole bumper would have gone back on in a handful of hours. But this is just where the story gets started. Instead of a quick swap there were several hours worth of measuring, cutting, test-fitting, trimming, and re-test fitting to go. The E-Tron’s Audi emblem was mounted about an inch higher than the emblem on the S3 grille, naturally, so it wasn’t the work of a moment.
The charging door assembly for this car is plastic welded to the factory grille, so I had to use my handy Dremel cutoff wheel to zip about fifteen melted plastic tabs off of the assembly to free it from its home. I zip-tied the four rings assembly in place on the new grille, then applied some JB Weld Plastic Bonder to join the new grille with the old emblem assembly.
While that mess cured I quickly swapped in the new brake duct grilles. I don’t think this car needs any additional brake cooling, and again I think this will probably be slightly worse aerodynamically, but you can’t go halfway with stuff like this. Whole hog, baby.
And before the whole bumper went back on the car I had to figure out driving light placement and get them wired and on the car. I am not an engineer, so a lot of this work was done purely on vibes. I measured the halfway point of the front bumper and worked out from there about where the lights should go. Then I drilled big holes all the way through the bumper and grabbed some longer bolts from the hardware store to affix the Hella-supplied brackets.
Once I got the bumper re-installed and bolted back up with everything functional and fashionable, I stepped back to admire my work and felt like I’d done a reasonable job. It looks a little janky if you look closely. The fog light holes needed to be cut bigger than I liked just to get them to fit through the grille, and the JB Weld is goopy in areas, but from ten feet it looks ace! Far from good, good from far, as they say. I’m reasonably pleased.
Well, I’d better plug the car in and call it a night. What a great project done and dusted. Wait, why doesn’t the charging door open all the way? Ah shit, of course.
Just when I thought I was done with this project, it throws me another curve ball. The Audi rings charging door opens to the side, of course, so it impacted the passenger side driving lamp. A little more trimming with the Dremel and we’re back in business. OK, so that’s isn’t great, but it’s barely noticeable. I’m not really fine with it, but it is what it is.
If I could go back and do this again I probably would opt out of the rally lights, as they caused most of my troubles in this project. I think the finished result looks great, and the two or three times per year I’ll use these lights they’ll probably be nice to have. Without the lights a lot more of the grille would be intact, and I wouldn’t have needed to trim the charge door, but hey, the worm is happy.
