After losing a baby earlier this year, it made me realise that turning 35 this month isn't so bad after all, life's priorities shift hugely. Having said that though, you know me, I like to have the thrill when owning/driving so I need to find a happy balance or the car will be gone after 9 months! Oh and whilst we are on the subject of middle aged, Paul, what car did you get when you turned 35, a brand new Austin Montego...?Scotty wrote:The opening post makes it all sounds very middle aged Kev
And there in lies the rub. After chatting to several B8 owners, the consumption seems no better than a RS4, in fact they echo everything you've written. So it's made me rethink things and contemplate whether my money goes towards a B7 RS4 instead, which is a minimum £5k cheaper and done most of it's depreciation. My only concern is the violent crime that seems to be increasing towards S/RS owners.DALO wrote:In my experience it isn't, no. But I reckon it's more of a case of setting your expectations at the right level.kmpowell wrote:I've read on here that real-world MPG is not as good as quoted, and early cars were particularly bad (causing complaints to Audi!)? Does this improve as the engine gets some miles on the clock? As long as I can get 30+ mpg on my motorway runs then I'll be happy.
My daily drive is a B7 RS4 (standard un-modded car) and I get about 20mpg day in day out, over a mixed fast / slow A road and town commute, against the quoted combined mpg of 20.9. We always get just under the combined figure on all of the cars we've owned (e.g. wife's Porsche does 27 against quoted 30).
While the RS was in for a few days of service work last month the dealer put me in a 12 plate S4 Avant demo car, as it's a car that I'd contemplate replacing the RS with in due course, being nearly as quick, but quite a lot cheaper. It had 5000 miles of demos and staff use so should have been fully run in. Over the course of nearly 200 miles over several days, it averaged just 22mpg - against a quoted 33! Driven exactly the same way over the same roads as my RS.... go figure!
Having said that though, I don't think it's unique to the S4, and more likely down to something that Audi are doings with the cars they send for testing these days, as I also had a loan A4 1.8t multitronic fairly recently, and that did just over 30mpg over the same roads, against a quoted 47; I also had nearly a year in an A3 TDi 140 s-Tronic, and that did 40mpg against a quoted 57! I do wonder if it's something to do with their DSG 'boxes though, but who knows...
Fuel economy aside I still think Audis are very good - the S4 for example was a nice bit of kit with a smooth punchy engine, with the exception of the adaptive steering, which I personally found irritating, and took away far too much feel from the wheel - but as others have said, I reckon you'd probably get used to it.
hmmmm
