Audi A4 1.8T Quattro (Manual)
One of our favorite sedans, the Audi A4 was thoroughly reworked three years ago, and its looks and major components haven’t been tampered with since then, which is okay with us. But in a recent comparison test against an Acura TSX, a Subaru Legacy 2.5GT, and a Volvo S40 T5, the A4 1.8T came in fourth because of its aging engineering. Nevertheless, we liked the S4 performance model introduced last year enough to include it on our 10Best list (see Sports and GT Cars). The rest of this sedan’s mechanical family includes Audi’s 170-hp, four-cylinder 1.8T engine and a 220-hp, 3.0-liter V-6. Four different gearboxes are offered, either standard or optional: a five-speed manual, a six-speed manual, a five-speed Tiptronic automatic, and Audi’s smooth, continuously variable transmission. There are only minor changes in equipment options for 2005.
Roll your cursor over the images above to see how a car placed in our front-wheel-drive competition, then click to find out more about it. Click here to check out the how the rear- and four-wheel-drive cars placed. Ross Converse’s call seeking a spot in our annual hyper-horsepower shootout, the Car and Driver “Supercar Challenge,” was a real surprise. We hadn’t heard from him since 1997, when he visited us from faraway Maine, where he had stuffed a couple of Ford V-8s into two Volvo wagons. Apparently, it took some time for word of our annual supercar event, now entering its fourth year, to penetrate the deep woods of Down East.
Our shootout is a two-day cornucopia of excessive horsepower and speed that’s as close as we can get to the wild and crazy era of the 1970s—when Yates unleashed a flock of nutballs in a cross-country race called the Cannonball—without having to post a lot of bail bonds
Roll your cursor over the images above to see how a car placed in our rear- and four-wheel-drive competition, then click to find out more about it. Click here to check out the how the front-wheel-drive cars placed. This year, we had two classes and lowered the 150-mph top speed. For the front-drive class, the maximum velocity was 130 mph; the rear- or four-wheel-drive class had to reach 140. We also borrowed an exhaust-gas analyzer from Horiba to test for the presence of a catalytic converter. Our measurements were not intended to determine legality, since laws differ from state to state, but we figured if a car had even a chance of being legal, it had to have a cat.
Get pdf Audi A4 1.8T Quattro (Manual)
