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Very happy with my purchase which was delivered last Wednesday. Initial impressions are all positive - it’s living up to the high expectations I have harboured. It is also turning lots of heads as it’s one of the first to arrive here in New Zealand. Took my first long drive wtih it yesterday - had the kid gloves on given fresh engine and green tires, but even under light/moderate levels of enthusiasm, it’s agile, potent, and sounds just great. And on the exhaust - I really feared I would sorely miss the B8’s V8 soundtrack, but the new V6 has a lovely bark to it and lots of pop and burble on the overrun (it’s the sports exhaust).

The tech is great, but I’ve had to spend a lot of time mastering all the phone interface options for phone/music/data/etc. Works great now that I’ve got the hang of it, but takes some time and patience to learn how to drive it. I love the feature that allows you to overlay Google maps on the SatNav. B&O system sounds really good too.

Seats are very comfortable and I was able to get a great seating position right away (I’m over 6 ft and this isn’t always the case - I drove a new SQ5 on loan from the dealership for a month while I waited for the B9 after they bought back my trade-in B8, and I really struggled to get comfy in that). There’s good visibility of the RS4’s dash through what is quite a small wheel. My kids also love the massage function on the seats!

Very happy with the black color - bit of a conservative option, but I was too nervous to go for the dark blue, and my B8 was Daytona Grey so didn’t want that either.

I have a long drive down country next week which will be a chance to get some km’s on the clock and start to put it through its paces on some twisty roads - looking forward to that.

Congratulations, love the alloy's couldn't get them in the UK without the carbon pack. If you can get the speech recognition to work let me know as I have failed every time apart from telling it to cancel.

Hi Cuttsy. Yes really like the alloys - and they are going to be much easier to clean than the standard issue wheels.

Speech recognition seems to work pretty well - have successfully spoken in addresses to navigate to etc. Maybe it just likes kiwi accents . The only tech problem I’m still having is getting it to send texts (SMS). The MMI system will receive texts and read them out to me, but I can’t dictate texts or reply (and there is no reply or send text option appearing on screen either) - so for texting unless I can sort it out, I’ll be plugging the phone (iPhone 8S) into the USB and using Apple CarPlay which works fine. I suspect the iPhone is to blame (the classic Apple problem of refusing to be fully compatible with any other device on the planet...).

My next challenge (being a park assist virgin) is to see if I trust it to park itself without curbing those alloys!

PS here is the New Zealand standard spec for anyone who is interested.

Congrats!!!
More pictures!

Black looks mean.

Mine has also arrived, due to pick up some time next week.

Here is my JSON data for those who are still waiting for their order.

"orderStatus":"70",
"statusDate":"2018-05-05T02:01:11+0100"

"orderStatus":"40",
"statusDate":"2018-04-27T02:01:10+0100"

"orderStatus":"30",
"statusDate":"2018-04-13T01:01:24+0100"

"orderStatus":"24",
"statusDate":"2018-04-02T00:00:00+0100"

"orderStatus":"23",
"statusDate":"2018-03-31T00:00:00+0100"

"orderStatus":"22",
"statusDate":"2018-03-30T00:00:00+0100"

"orderStatus":"21",
"statusDate":"2018-03-29T00:00:00+0100"

"orderStatus":"20",
"statusDate":"2018-03-16T01:01:39+0000"

"orderStatus":"10",
"statusDate":"2018-02-15T01:01:43+0000"

"orderStatus":"00",
"statusDate":"2018-01-16T01:10:47+0000"

Thanks big0r. The times seem to vary a lot. The quickest I have seen is status 21 to 70 in 9 days on an A3 last summer.
I'm at status 24, been good so far because there is an update every day at that stage. I've noticed large variations in time spent in QC, and also waiting for a ship.

KiwiRS4driver wrote:PS here is the New Zealand standard spec for anyone who is interested.

7FBBE1D9-00DF-4827-BE9B-5DF2BEC8BEB8.jpeg

That is amazing standard spec!! We pay a fortune to add that in UK! Wonder how pricing works out..


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I think we get a tougher deal here in NZ being about as far from the factory as you can get - that standard spec here per the photo above is NZ$150,000 which works out currently to be GBP77,000. Not sure what your pricing is in the UK, but I’m guessing the UK standard (lower) spec is way cheaper than that, and also that if you add all the things on the NZ standard list, you’ll still come out better off - be interested to know though.

KiwiRS4driver wrote: ↑

Sun May 20, 2018 8:57 am

I think we get a tougher deal here in NZ being about as far from the factory as you can get - that standard spec here per the photo above is NZ$150,000 which works out currently to be GBP77,000. Not sure what your pricing is in the UK, but I’m guessing the UK standard (lower) spec is way cheaper than that, and also that if you add all the things on the NZ standard list, you’ll still come out better off - be interested to know though.

The standard spec in the UK lists at around GBP61k, so I guess if you added on the options to bring it to NZ spec, you'd be looking at circa GBP68k-ish

My guess is more. The wheels alone would be £3K, then DRC, exhaust, comfort pack, driving pack, parking pack.
NZ is still getting stung but not by much.

Here are some more pix....

Very nice

Wheel envy!

I think it's what we get as the Carbon Edition.
I really like it.


Nice to see it can rain in NZ and not just here.