Gadgetory

let's face it when you take a walk through the land of affordable German sports sedans you have to pass by this guy the 3-series well Howdy's got nothing to be ashamed of these days let's drive the all growed up refined and polished 2011 a4 and check the tech first there are two really big differences between an a4 and a3 series and a4 is generally speaking a 4-cylinder turbo car whereas the BMW 3s almost all use primarily sixes turn to a non turbo but as we'll see I think you'll get over that and the a4 is available still as a wagon or an Avant as they call it which the 3-series that matter the c-class are not now one of the first things to know about an a4 is that Audi's going to keep telling you how big it is in this generation it's not that big a car but compared to what it was it has come up to class you look at the car outside and say ok it's a normal size but they've really emphasized legroom I've got this car already set up with the right leg room for me but I can really keep going and I'm pretty tall and I'm still going and I'm still going ok this seats all the way back I'm is over 6 - and this is ridiculous you could be six five or more and you'll drive this car just fine I can't even reach the pedals right now it's like I'm a midget now our car is a Premium Plus that's important to know right off the bat because unless you get the top trim above this the prestige you can't get blind spot technology you can't get adaptive cruise control and you can't get out E Drive select which would give you a bunch of pre-programmed buttons down here to change the transmission behavior steering and suspension settings so those three are off the table on this trim level now let's see what we do have thanks to a lot of our cart toys we have the Audi MMI LCD and control surface down here this is not a widescreen it's basically a four by three aspect ratio unlike most BMWs for example but it's got really good quality check out the dot pitch on that Audi's really big on this synthetic world stuff you've got 3d buildings there at least generic blocks the graphics that power this are Nvidia by the way so things move along real nicely and that rendering is partly thanks to that good powerful graphics engine and getting around this guy is really easy once you figure out outies logic if you haven't seen it before one central controller here that turns it has a click on it and also has a little bit of a wiggler right there on the knob see this you can move around with a little black knob on top I find it a little bit fiddly for automotive use when you're driving along I wish the whole thing moved but this is Audi's way of doing it and in most menus you've got these four buttons that correspond to those four corners this is the Audi MMI thing different from I Drive different from Mercedes command different for everybody really now in terms of media the first thing we get here because our car is a premium plus is we get that guy there in the glovebox that's the ami the Audi music interface you can get a bunch of different cables that go into that master connector in this case we have the all popular apple dock connector I have my iPod Touch connected in there now upper right button again gives me source and there's my iPod now one thing you're going to like about this car is it Scrolls things well I don't know if it's pre caching or just accessing the device quickly in real time it doesn't matter here's our SD card slots now T's kind of the folks that are hanging onto that idea we've got two SD one and SD two optical disk slot here of course they've got an mp3 CD it reads just fine finally jukebox I can import from either my optical disk or my SD cards it's kind of nice and in terms of radio we have AM FM and Sirius Sirius AM and FM are on every trim of a 4s by the way HD radio comes in as par of this navigation package so how's it sound well pretty good because we have the Bang & Olufsen audio system now some of these Audi's have Bang & Olufsen systems that cost $6,000 you know the ones that the pop up tweeters I've never been $6,000 impressed by the sound of it however this guy's got a much more affordable $850 B&O upgrade the speakers don't go up and down those little tweeter acoustic lenses whatever the hell they call them or not here but the sound is here it it sounds good especially for that price as part of our nav package there's a lot rolled into this guy we also have the backup camera looks like so we've got trajectory we've got three zone four proximity and we have two different ways to look at the parking situation using my button here in the upper right see that icon up there I can change that to help me park parallel or perpendicular okay the engine the a4 is the same engine in all a fours 2-liter intercooled turbo on a dual overhead cam in line for this guys got all kinds of awards ward's 10 best engines International engine of the year it's got direct injection all the latest technologies it is really an outstanding smooth mode the numbers 211 horsepower not a lot but then that turbo kicks in 258 foot-pounds of torque that works gets this 3600 ish pound car up to 60 in about six and a half seconds that'll depend on the gearbox and the drivetrain we'll talk about that in a minute mpg is 21:29 on this car with a Tiptronic you do a little better if you have a manual now there are three things you can hook up to the back of this engine first of all a CVT continuously variable transmission that's kind of your base configuration then you can go to the six-speed manual as I mentioned for the best zero-to-sixty and economy or you can go with this 8-speed Tiptronic we have with the Quattro all-wheel drive now one thing you hear me say about outies all the time is how damn smooth they are and this one is no exception even though it's relatively low on their lineup this a4 has got all the silkiness of an a8 to be honest not the same presence and weight but things that spin don't get any harsher here than they do in the much expensive brethren it's a fun car to drive and I find the cabin a lot more pleasant than a 3-series and much younger and more youthful than a Mercedes cabin now this engines a turbo of course the powers ample and silky my only gripe is at least in this configuration I catch the car flat-footed all too often whether I'm in Drive or down here in sport it just seeks high gears too often for mpg reasons I'm sure but I got to wait for it to kick down a couple years more than I want it to that takes away some of the some of the snaps some of the responsiveness you can put it over here in the Tiptronic gate but if I buy a car than automatic I don't want to spend a lot of time shifting it to be quite honest I wanted to do a better job of doing that itself okay let's price an a4 grab a cup of coffee this may take a while one of those complicated cars its price range to configure base on this guy with a CVT gearbox in front-wheel drive is 33,000 then it gets complex add about 2200 for a Tiptronic gearbox and Quattro or close to a thousand for a 6-speed manual with Quattro Premium Plus is 30 for 50 more which brings you the Audi music interface Bluetooth triple zone climate control heated front seats and better headlights step it up to prestige adding $5,200 and you get the MMI interface GPS Navi and Olufsen sound rear camera and sensors total keyless and bigger wheels and blessedly the be a no audio rig on this guy is only 850 and probably worth it unlike its $6,000 big brother to my ears anyway you