Taking the rough with the smooth (Audi A6 2.4 SE)

Member Name: jrst112

Product:	Audi A6 2.4 SE
Date:	09/01/03 (1530 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quiet, refined, very comfortable

Disadvantages: Unreliable, terrible auto box, bad brakes

Taking the rough with the smooth

I wanted a second-hand car that was reliable, comfortable, reasonably fast and under £11k. Sadly, I didn't get one. Here's why.

We'll start from the outside and work our way in, shall we? Don't expect to turn heads in an Audi A6. It looks almost exactly the same as the A4 and not all that dissimilar from the A3 when seen from the front. On the other hand, you could say the same about the far more expensive A8. Presumably, people don't buy an Audi to stand out in the crowd. I didn't, anyway.

Let's get inside. We open the doors using the unnecessarily huge key fob for the remote central locking. The doors are annoyingly stiff and have a tendency to want to close unless you wrench them all the way open. However, when you DO close them, they make a very satisfying "thunk", reminding you that yes, this is indeed a huge German barge. Congratulations, you have now arrived in Capitalist Success City!

Now for the best bit: the A6 2.4 SE saloon is very comfortable indeed. Before you even turn the engine on, the comfort begins, because the seats are excellent. The A6's electric memory front seats are adjustable in almost every way you can think of and that makes the A6 one of the few genuinely comfortable cars available, at any price. I've tried the driving seats in BMW, Jaguar, Lexus and Mercedes and they all can and should learn from Audi in the seating department.

Apart from that, the inside is quite acceptable, albeit nothing special. The steering wheel is adjustable: it goes up and down, and in and out (and of course, most importantly, round and round!). The dashboard is large and has lots of dials to look at when you get bored of watching the traffic. As well as the standard ones you also get in every other car you've ever seen, you get an oil temperature gauge, a battery charge meter and a large, garish, LED "Driver's
Information System". This can tell you all manner of useless information, such as your average fuel consumption, your projected range at current consumption rate and how many hours have passed since last time you pressed the button to reset how many hours have passed. The best and most useless feature is that when the outside temperature is below 5 Celsius, it draws a pretty snowflake.

The wing mirrors are electric and fold all the way back when parked (or when driving, I suppose, if you like). Both the main rear mirror and the wing mirrors are "self-dipping", meaning the brighter following drivers' headlights, the more the mirrors dim. No, you're quite right, it doesn't work very well and it would be much better to have a simple, manual switch, as on so many much cheaper cars.

Enough looking, let's drive somewhere. Remember how I wanted a car that was comfortable? For me, "comfortable" also means "quiet". Under 50mph, there are no complaints: the A6 is as near to silent as you can get on today's roads. Above 50mph, there's a surprising amount of wind and road noise for a car of this size and purported quality, but the A6 is still quieter than most cars, including some of its aforementioned competitors.

Now for some bad news: the gearbox. My A6 is a "Tiptronic" automatic and how I wish it weren't. I prefer manual gearboxes, but I was pushed for time during my last car-purchasing ordeal and I had to compromise. The A6's five-speed auto box is terrible; it "adapts" to your style of driving, which in practice means it either changes up far too soon or far too late. Moreover, at certain steady speeds, such as about 25mph or about 40mph, it thrashes up and down, unable to decide which gear it wants. Forget about using the Tiptronic instead, by the way, because if you accelerate hard in low gear and try to change up, it won't: it'll just s
cream away at high revs until you give in and either take your foot off the accelerator, or let the horrible fully automatic shift take over, which slows you down anyway. The only practical use I've found for the Tiptronic is holding the car in fifth on the motorway, because otherwise it changes jerkily and noisily down to fifth if you try to accelerate even gently from about 65mph.

The auto box is so bad that it nearly disguises the A6's really rather good performance. The A6 gives the strong impression that it doesn't like to accelerate more than absolutely necessary. Nor do I, actually, so in some ways that doesn't matter to me: I'm not a fast driver. However, on the rare occasions when I do want to accelerate quickly, I have to give the A6 a good kicking. In response, it complains a lot, delaying up-changes far too late for my tastes and making horrible roaring noises. This is a shame, because it has a pretty respectable turn of speed for such a big car, although I should think so too, with a 2.4 litre V6.

I suppose we should mention fuel consumption, since the forthcoming conflict in the Middle East may force oil prices yet higher. Considering the size of the engine, the A6 is not at all thirsty. Well, not the way I drive, anyway: those with heavier right feet have found it less frugal. I get 35mpg on motorway trips and about 28mpg around town.

The A6's road-holding is very good, as far as I can tell. Since I never go all that fast, I can't be sure, but it feels extremely stable and the combination of traction control (or "ASR" as Audi opaquely names it), ABS, minimal body-roll and a wide body mean I've never had so much as a hint of skidding or wheel-spin. It all feels very safe, with one exception: the brakes.

The brakes on the A6 feel like they aren't going to work. You have to press them VERY hard to stop quickly. No, there's no air in the system: the brakes j
ust feel soft and nasty. They do work in the end, but they don't inspire any confidence at all and I'd hate to have to rely on them in an emergency. Yes, I know it's a big car, but ten years ago I had a Jaguar XJ6 weighing a good 300kg more than the A6 and the Jag used to stop very quickly indeed, so I know perfectly well that brakes can be better than this. Less dramatically, it's extremely difficult to bring the A6 to a gentle halt without that horrible forward-and-back jerking that I haven't perpetrated since I first learnt to drive. Nobody else I've invited to drive my A6 has managed it, either.

Just before we finish with the car itself, here's a comparatively minor but very annoying gripe: the pedals are too close together. No matter how small your shoes, you can't get your feet between the accelerator and brake, nor between the brake and the foot-rest. Does the brake pedal have to be quite this huge? (It's not as if it does anything much when you press it, after all?)

So much for when the car works: but it fails to work far more often than acceptable. I bought my A6 from an Audi main dealer as an "Audi Approved Car". The claim made for such vehicles is that they are "in showroom condition, by which we mean that they are exactly the same as a new car". If this is true, then all I can say is that I strongly advise you never to buy a new Audi. My A6 was supplied to me with three bald tyres, a battery so old that it could no longer hold a charge, split wiper blades and various stone chips on the paintwork. An enthusiastic but inefficient valet left literally dripping wet seats and a thin, slightly slippery patina of wax on all the controls, although it conspicuously failed to empty two of the ashtrays of sweet wrappers left by the previous owner.

Audi claims that all its approved cars have passed a 110-point check before delivery. Apparently, these 110 points do not inc
lude checking that the battery won't die completely within three days, which happened to me. The salesman, bless his little weasel ways, was surprisingly helpful and responsive and forced his service department to fix all the above, but the trouble wasn't over. Oh, no.

One of the alleged new tyres fitted to replace the bald ones was flat within a month and had sidewall damaged as well. Coincidence? Possibly, but I haven't had a flat tyre for over five years prior to getting this Audi. More seriously, the A6 has utterly failed to start on two separate occasions, forcing me to call Audi's breakdown line to get someone to come and deal with it. Audi's call centre doesn't always bother to staff this line properly and the most recent call took twelve minutes even to be answered, plus another hour's wait for the RAC to arrive (Audi people don't bother turning up themselves, no matter how serious the incident, apparently). The RAC man said that one instance was the throttle sensor and the other was, yes, the "new" battery not holding its charge.

This is not "reliable", not by a long way. The most important criterion on my list was reliability and the Audi A6 just isn't reliable. I expected a lot more from Audi, whom I shall forthwith remove from my list of makes of reliable cars. Actually, I wish now that I'd bought another Nissan Primera: they might be a bit tinny, but they drive well, they have sensible gearboxes, the brakes work and they never go wrong. And I could have bought two of them for the price of my Audi.

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