Gadgetory

the Allroad it used to be an Audi a6 that looked a little bit too much like a Subaru now it's an Audi a4 that looks like an Audi a4 just taller let's drive this smallest tallest Audi wagon and check the tech now in all rode is an all road and not a wagon because it's got some extra ground clearance and it's got some stainless steel guards underneath the thing so when you go driving around the Grand Tetons and decide I'll leave the Jeep at home this will come back more or less in one piece and you can easily spot an all road a thousand yards away because it has this kind of JC Whitney asked body cladding hmm luckily you can get that painted more on that later now the first thing that makes me grin when I get inside an Audi is that I think it's the most CNET looking cockpit of a car and it's direct competitive set you got this burnished aluminum kind of low gloss but a very precise looking at a functional yet comfortable cabin it's not too Baroque looking at you Mercedes and it's not too humorless looking at you BMW right in the middle the main display is interesting point of contention on this car it's squarish and smallish much bigger you'd find in a Cadillac or a Mopar product much wider you'd find in a BMW but Audi hangs on in what is a relatively older interface now and it still does the job well it's got some quirks notably the four corners of the screen map to these four buttons I've never really gotten used to that and the knob goes the wrong way you turn counterclockwise to go down a list that strikes me as odd maybe not you it's a connected system that means you can use Google search to find where you want to go and you can use Google Earth as your view instead of these kind of simplistic 3d buildings look at that here comes 3d satellite imagery and Beyond Google Earth you can even get down to a street view level take a little tour of a neighborhood you have been to before might decide not to go there it's powered by a built-in internet connection in the car that SIM card right there is just for the car your phone doesn't need to do anything to bring in this data I'm showing you that data connection is free for six months then it's going to cost you thirty bucks a month from t-mobile partnership that Audi has it's not real cheap is it all the modern media is here including my not so favorite SD card slots two of them to add insult to injury and I'm not crazy about how they do portables this is ouch this Audi interface over here in the glove box that's not convenient that's Antarctica this of course is a traditional iPhone connector you iPhone five folks I've got to put the adapter on here and not sure how well it works yet and you can put other pigtails on here but obviously one at a time what I would do keep your iPhone in your pocket buy a cheap little nano on eBay and leave it plugged in there the key technology that answers all of that of course is bluetooth streaming which you've got on this car along with Bluetooth hands-free and very good phone book handling as well the parking tech on this car consists of sonar and the rear camera nothing tremendously sexy about it this panoramic glass routes a nice touch you got a big panel over the second row and of course a big mover over the first it's a two row car anything to cure the claustrophobia is good now all all roads have a 2.0 T outtie engine and audi lingo the t either means turbocharger or supercharger depending how much they want to screw with you on this one that means turbocharger on other cars it means supercharger I give up 2 litre inline-four sitting longitudinally these cars of course are all Quattro it'd be kind of a joke if you had something called the all road that wasn't always Quattro four-wheel drive now because we've got a turbo here it's torque heavy 211 horsepower 258 foot-pounds of torque gets this 3900 pound car to 60 in a respectable six and a half seconds while delivering 2027 EPA rated mpg that means an average of 23 according to the government that means an average of 20 according to me now this a4 sorry all road doesn't disappoint in the fact that it has the Audi trademarks precise smooth light on its feet and has lots of power at initial tip in I feel like half the power in this car is available in the first 25% of throttle pedal which is the perception of great power push it further and it kind of flattens out a bit you really find flat spots or I do anyway when you manually shift this thing by putting the lever over here on the right put it in drive and it's a real poke it hits too many top gears interesting note this car is an 8-speed automatic Tiptronic it's the only way you can get it seventh and eighth are overdrive I don't think I've seen that before usually just top gear in so the top two gears are overwhelmed if you will by the engine's ratio and when you need to step on it in Drive it has to climb out of 8th and 7th to get anywhere so that's something that I think is best handled by leaving it in sport mode I don't know how well you can see back there in the cargo bay but it's kind of a it kind of comes to a point it's kind of rounded in the back and that kills a fair amount of usable cargo space especially for square or large objects so think of yourself buying an all road for the clearance the off-road ability and for the fact that it's got a giant truck but is still kind of using sedan DNA in terms of what it can carry okay to do an all road CNET style you got to order it in the prestige trim the top of the three unfortunately you're already staring at a forty-nine thousand dollar car at that point but that does give you the nav the google connected services but to continue CNET style you're going to want to add 32 54 the driver assistance package that's going to get you adaptive cruise control variable ratio smart steering and the Audi Drive select which lets you choose different personalities for the car it's a very good system and for $1,000 more they will paint all this body cladding the same color as the car yes please and at this trim level we're also talking about including the panoramic roof and basically every single thing I showed you except now we've got a $53,000 for series and that's what I'm going to go fill out the least paperwork and not the purchase