Bani new car shopping: Audi A3

[bani]

I'm shopping for a new car. To help sort out the decision I'm putting down my test drive notes 'on paper'.

2006 Audi A3

Trim tested

2.0T DSG
2.0T MT

First impressions:

Beautiful car. This is an entry-level luxury car, and it sure looks the part. Fit and finish are nop notch. Hardly anything looks or feels cheap. "Officially" a wagon, its dimensions and styling are closer to a hatchback.

Interior

Cushy. Love the instrument cluster with graphical display and clear, brightly lit and easy to read gauges. Good ergonomics overall, with one OMGWTFBBQ: the e-brake bumps into the center armrest when it's down. In order to engage the e-brake you have to flip the center armrest up. How the hell did that one get by? What was Audi smoking?

The sunroof shade is perforated, not solid like most other shades, which might annoy drivers who want to be able to completely block the sunlight out.

Rear seats are very comfortable, but there is even less rear legroom than a subaru impreza (which is a pretty snug car). I'm avearge height but sitting in the rear seats my head was touching the roof! The A3 is basically an upscale VW Golf, so where the hell did all the rear legroom and headroom go?

Exterior

Elegant, understated. Like a BMW with a different logo. Which is a good thing, since the BMW logo seems to invoke road-rage-by-default in drivers who happen to see the blue and white logo.

The styling is a bit strange, but in a good way. It does not look quite like any other car on the road, which is nice. It almost has a miniature suv-ish appearance in its lines. It's a somewhat squat, and slightly wide car.

The A3 does not look like a sporty car at all, which should keep riceboys and police radar guns at bay.

The one downside is the impossibly visually noisy wheels with sixteen spokes. These wheels are going to seriously be a PITA to clean.

Road Test

Boring, almost banal. The 2.0L turbocharged engine delivers 200hp with a wide torque band. Torque is available seemingly everywhere and in every gear, with almost no turbo lag. Everything from the engine to road noise is completely muted. It is nearly impossible to hear the engine while in normal acceleration or cruising, only when you WOT does the engine seem to come to life.

Even "spirited" driving in the A3 is delivered with almost no drama. In fact it is ridiculously easy to speed in this car without realizing it. With a nearly silent engine and little road noise, the only real way to tell how fast you are going is to always look at the tachometer. Acceleration comes smoothly and easily, but never explosively.

There is only a hint of feedback through the steering wheel, most of it being damped out by the power steering assist -- which makes it somewhat difficult for the car to communicate the road to the driver. Overall the car is agile and secure, with less body roll than the Subaru Impreza WRX Wagon and better handling than the understeer-happy Mazdaspeed6. The A3 floats above the road, unconcerned with speed bumps, potholes or railroad tracks.

Braking is very smooth, pedal feel is a little light but with good feedback. ABS is very well modulated and without the machine-gun stutter of other ABS systems.

The one diamond in the banality of the overall A3 driving experience is the astounding DSG. Upshifts and downshifts are painless and instantaneous, butter-smooth with absolutely no jerkiness. When you downshift at speed, the engine quietly and quickly blips the revs to match the gear before engaging, making for superhumanly smooth shifting. Not quite as satisfying as a traditional manual gearbox, but i'll take one of these any day over a traditional slushbox.

The A3's manual gearbox in comparison is utterly horrendous. It's easily the worst clutch I've ever used. It has such a short engagement that it is nearly impossible to feather the clutch, forcing you to be constantly over-revving the engine in order to move from dead stops without stalling the engine. In fact I would describe the A3's clutch as having two modes -- "ON" and "OFF". I suspect Audi deliberately made the manual gearbox this way so buyers would always choose the more expensive DSG option.

The A3 is available in Audi's AWD 'quattro' trim, though this really isn't true AWD, and it isn't even Audi's own traditional 'quattro'. It's a bit misleading -- it's a haldex setup which means that unlike true AWD in the Audi A4 or Subaru Impreza, the quattro A3 is FWD most of the time and only engages the rear wheels via a clutch when the computer senses the front wheels slipping. In normal driving you have to push the car pretty hard to get the rear wheels to engage. And to be honest I never pushed the A3 hard enough to do that -- it simply wasn't an interesting enough drive to be bothered with.

And I have to wonder why most people would even bother with the quattro A3. The handling of the standard FWD A3 is so good that unless you plan to be rallying your A3 through 10 inches of snow all the time, a good set of snow tires on a FWD A3 should be more than sufficient for most winter climates. Instead of paying the extra $$$ for the A3's imitation AWD, get a Subaru Legacy instead.

Conclusion

I don't quite understand this car. It's basically an expensive luxury hatchback. But hatchbacks aren't supposed to be luxurious or expensive. It's not particularly sporty -- it goes fast, but you'd never feel it.

Overall, this is the kind of car you'd drive your grandmother to church on sundays at 120mph and she'd never know you're travelling that fast. And neither would you.

[Ragnar_40k]

A3 is the "low end" Audi ...

And the clutch - I think they call it "sportive".

[wipeout]

Yea, that's what they call it. My father owns one (several years old, old design) and it's the car I usually drive when I need one. And the clutch is sooo annoying.
First of all, you need to get used to it (it doesn't feel like any other clutch in any other car, does it?). Then, once you got used to it, you never really feel comfortable with it. And the absolute worst: just drive another car for at least one time and it all starts again from the beginning.

And about the speed feeling: You really never feel like accelerating or driving fast. Absolutely true. Even the Skoda Octavia Combi (dunno what it's called in english) of my mom gives me way more feedback when accelerating even though it's a diesel.
Don't get why they give you this "sportive" clutch, but never really want to give you the feeling of driving a sportive car.

But other then that it's really a nice car.

[Ragnar_40k]

According to this the Audi counterpart for the Impreza is the A4 and not the A3.

[bani]

an a4 avant trimmed comparatively with a wrx is wayyyyyyy too expensive.

[deej]

The one diamond in the banality of the overall A3 driving experience is the astounding DSG. Upshifts and downshifts are painless and instantaneous, butter-smooth with absolutely no jerkiness. When you downshift at speed, the engine quietly and quickly blips the revs to match the gear before engaging, making for superhumanly smooth shifting. Not quite as satisfying as a traditional manual gearbox, but i'll take one of these any day over a traditional slushbox.

I told you. Put this gearbox in your Golf GTI and you have a funfilled and exiting car, that's very comfortable when just cruising but can turn itself into a little screaming monster in a blink of an eye.

BTW when you put the DSG in "S" instead of "D", it shifts even shorter and brakes on the engine (dunno if they say that in english). Pure fun!