Gadgetory

well I say howdy you probably think about a fairly capable rather impressive performance vehicle with sharp top responses but sometimes and maybe card it's just kind of silly and fun this is that car let's try the 2015 Audi a3 Cabriolet with the little engine and no Quattro let's check the tech now the a3 was heavily revised for this 2015 model year gen a nice power top is beautifully insulated a glass back light it cycles in less than 20 seconds and can do so up to 31 miles per hour okay our a3 cab keeping it affordable here is about 36 v base that's a 1/8 front wheel drive and the basic trim level a tick under 2 grand gets us navigation this is one of my favorites in the industry worth the money driver assist for 1,400 gets you parking sonar rear camera and blind spot tech and like it or not I kind of not the Audi am i music interface is something you're gonna want for your portables that's about 350 bucks all in word about 40,000 100 that's kind of your minimum CNET spec now inside the a3 just like outside of the a3 this car is all grown up it is a premium compact car you can tell by the nice finishes in the vehicle even though it's not terribly ornate your eyes drawn immediately of course to this head unit this pop-up screen that in the sedan I think is silly in the cab I think it's great because it hides this delicate piece of gear from the elements when you either want to on-demand or when the car turns off some other things to tell you this car is premium is the fact that you can get banging Olufsen audio I wouldn't but you can get it howdy drives select but you really control the personality of the vehicle exceptionally well and you've got a built-in 4G connection that brings us back to this head unit look at that nav display you're looking at a combination of 4G data pipeline Google Earth data and imagery and Nvidia graphics processing in terms of sheer map interface this is the best in the biz right now and it moves very smoothly underway which a lot of other cars don't even without photorealism and that 4g icon see down there is right next to my phone icon because they're separate this is not pulling data from my phone like most connected cars do today it's got its own LTE radio pricing on that 4G connections gonna be a sticking point for folks after a six month free period you're gonna pay $100 for five gigabytes across six months or $500 get you 30 gigabytes across 30 months nobody likes another wireless bill I think that goes to zero in the industry in the years ahead but for now it's gonna stick in your craw being a German car as typically is the case no touch we've got a voice command button over here but that's at ease and the cab there's no voice command the hardware's not in or available in the sedan of course it would be this is how you control everything you've got a turn kick and click wheel you've got four zone buttons around it the correspond to the menu zones and the corners of the screen you've got these two rockers that kick up or down into any of the four major functions and on top of that controller you've got a nice big finger touchpad particularly good for writing out things like addresses let's talk about media Audi's have a great assortment of that of course the part that I want to point out is that they're still using this damn outtie am i connector which is a proprietary buck on one end and then you choose the cable that has the other end that goes to what you want iPhone or USB or what have you this makes me nuts they've got a USB port down here which is what I want to use but notice it's charged only maybe next year they'll give us a USB port that's also smart now one of the little button nose of our a3 we find in this case the lesser of two engines that aren't that far apart this is the 1.8 liter sidesaddle for turbo charge with direct injection they call it a TFSI engine this is going to give you 170 horsepower 200 pound feet of torque so this little guy's got about 3400 pounds of car to move which he gets up to 60 in about 7 and a half seconds while delivering very good mpg to 4:35 they're in the rationale for the 1.8 now these 1.8 by the way are all front-wheel drive if you want all wheel drive you're going into a 2-liter and they all use the six-speed dual-clutch automated manual well as I mentioned we had the 2-liter Quattro we had the sedan of this car now I've got the 1.8 liter front-wheel drive and I miss the 2-liter Quattro not so much the four-wheel drive which I don't need right now in this situation but I missed the engine and the transmission relationship we had a some turbo lag I detect there's some gear logic lag there's some transmission actuation lag and in general therefore feels like it's kind of always playing catch-up it's like behind the 8-ball in terms of power response the ride quality however is really good and fits a car like this I mean it's a little cab I don't really want a gutsy track to suspension in a car that has the top going down this is a great little car though even though it's not as sharp as some Audi's are in a performance sense it's very livable I just wish the powertrain was a little more snappy to go with it's nice tidy lines