Gadgetory

howdy has declared war on America's standoffish relationship with Diesel's sticking the engines in almost every model but this one's the most stylish let's drive the 2014 a 70 di and check the tech and the status at the front lines now the a7 is a very popular car in terms of Halo 4 Audi then the sell a lot it's about 9 percent of their sales not bad but it's a premium model but it accounts for two or three times that much of the company is sort of hype right now and its rep everyone knows and loves this car but it's thought of as a sporty four-door coupe when you put a diesel in there at least in the American market that tends to fight the sporty sleek sort of mentality and that's gonna be an interesting question to see how well it pulls off those two sets of DNA not much different on the outside you won't have the TDI graphics you'll find on our press car so you'll have to spot one of these guys buy the TDI badge on its rump now inside the 70 di is no different substantially from any other 7 so I'm not gonna do a huge deep dive into the cabin tech to find out about that go look at our previous reviews on the a7 and the s7 at cars cnet.com only a few things tip you off you're in a diesel the tachometer is the main one there's your red line at what 4800 rpm that would be what about 2000 lower than in the supercharged gas engine car and on a really cold morning like our shoot day today there's a moment or two pause when you first start the car that reminds you it's a diesel as well and this is interesting and energy consumers screen that shows you what parasitic operations are dragging down the engines efficiency and with a rough estimation by how many gallons of fuel per hour they're burning and in keeping with the efficient diesel theme a couple of other things here you've got an auto start/stop defeat normally this car will auto start-stop at lights or in traffic the stop-and-go luckily that defeat is sticky defeat it once and it stays that way and that's how I like it I'll show you why in a moment now under the hood you know it's a diesel even if you didn't look at it you can hear it turbocharged v6 three liter there's your turbo right there slightly smaller for the US than Europe so it has better low rpm spool up at the sacrifice of I believe a little bit of top speed not that it matters its academic your numbers on this guy are 240 horsepower kind of small for a 4,300 pound car but 428 foot-pounds of torque that's a stunning Delta between horsepower and torque zero to sixty is five and a half seconds what really matters is the mpg twenty four city thirty eight highway 29 average one drivetrain 8-speed automatic Tiptronic and of course Quattro all-wheel drive let's go see how it works okay on the road the first thing I noticed in this a 70 di is I'm hearing more diesel noise than I do in some other Diesel's that we've driven lately that don't even cost as much I'm kind of surprised by that at idle and in cine conditions I hear it come through rather notably that's not what I expected here once you're out on the road there is such great torque from this car it feels like you can get into any sort of situation you need to hit it's always got the beat the thing is though it needs to get schooled up a little I know how to tune the turbo in this American version to spool up faster but it still gets buried under a little turbo lag and it's to overdrive gears unless you've got it in one of the dynamic modes or your self shifting or it's in sport mode you had all these different modes to wake it up it's kind of a laggard until it gets fooled up compared to the supercharged v6 gas version of the same car zero to sixty is just two tenths slower in the diesel while average mpg is 28% better the steering on this car was very odd for me it's an electromechanical steering rack but when the lane-departure tech is turned on which is active by the way it'll - from drifting out of a lane by using the steering rack it gets in the way a whole bunch of times I was driving once down the road straight line and it corrected me I wasn't doing anything that even corrected sometimes it will let you go all the way onto the line and then it corrects other times it's very conservative pulls you back when you're nowhere near the line and other times this little icon on the dash indicates it just can't find the lines when it goes yellow so this system seems to be somewhere between a work-in-progress and a mess I wasn't impressed by it I'm going to assume it's this car because Audi doesn't normally get those things wrong but I'll tell you infinity and accurate tend to get them more right okay this price this guy about $68,000 delivered for an a7 TDI they have two trim levels that's the basic one on top of that you can add a driver assistance package for twenty eight hundred bucks that's the lane departure stuff we talked about and also adaptive cruise and some stop and go and city traffic 8050 mortgage of Bose audio all in about seventy one five done up see that style okay if you drive one of these here's how you should check the tech note the power delivery and if it's sensitive enough for you and everyday driving at the same time listen in for the diesel noise I found that kind of intrusive you may not lane departure warning seems a little nibbly and weird to me and very conservative let's just kind of get to the dotted line before it does anything finally check the math this car cost about twenty four hundred dollars all things being equal just for the diesel option my back of the envelope penciling out tells me it's about a six point two year earn back at current prices it doesn't really make sense to be honest I doubt you'll have this car that long so you've got to also factor in the fact that you love diesel torque and the fact that it's got nineteen percent lower co2 emissions