Post by racingteatray on Feb 7, 2022 17:51:31 GMT
As part of deliberations on “what car next”, as noted we’ve ascertained that a Macan would fit the bill and I have duly put a deposit down to get in the queue for an allocation of a GTS. But in the meantime, I am checking out other options that fit the bill.
My wife is keen that whatever car we get next should be no larger than our current car, and she’d be happiest if it could be a bit smaller in terms of overall length and general wieldiness. Being short, she finds the low-slung 440i with its long bonnet difficult to manoeuvre. We are also both keen that it should come with “surround view”, having seen this in action in my sister’s Passat GTE and realised it would be very handy, particularly in Italy where the streets in the old town around our flat are very tight and so is access to our garage.
This led me to the RSQ3. Largely because it’s almost exactly the right size, being usefully shorter (4.5m) and narrower than our current car, but taller…and equipped with an engine I really liked when I tried in an RS3 a few years ago. But the road test reviews are not raving about it, so I was a bit sceptical.
Anyhow.
I had a good nose around a Sport Edition in Daytona Grey (nice) with 21” black alloys (less nice) and a pano roof that they had in the showroom. I’m not always a big fan of Audi’s recent design efforts but I definitely like the exterior design overall – it looks just the right sort of chunky with a planted four-square stance and it’s a more cohesive effort than the larger Q5 if you ask me. In grey with black trimmings and red calipers, it looked just the right degree of tasty without being too excessively boy-racer.
The doors feel weighty, and open and close with a reassuringly expensive and muffled thunk. But - and it feels odd to say this about an Audi – the quality of the interior fixtures and fittings is very mixed and really isn’t good enough. It’s a relatively smart-looking interior at first glance, albeit a bit messy-looking compared to the restrained ergonomics of past generations of Audis. The steering wheel feels nice, the colour screens are bright, modern and attractive (although the touch-screen irritates – the rotary iDrive control that BMW use is a much better solution), the metal-finished switchgear feels nice, the leather feels like leather (although I’m not crazy about diamond-quilting) and there are judiciously used fillets of alcantara here and there, but the majority of the plastics look and feel cheap. As in, they’d look cheap in a £30-40k car. In a £60k car, they are verging on unforgivable. The door cards are particularly barren-looking expanses of dark grey plastic and the base mouldings of the seats where the rather rudimentary electric seat controls sit, look like they could have come from something like a Seat Ibiza. This car costs as much as an optioned-up Macan S and even a basic Macan without a leather dashboard feels night and day more premium inside.
That said, for a car that’s only 4.5m long, it was surprisingly spacious and comfortable inside (more so in the back seat than the larger Macan) with a reasonably-sized boot that looks on par with what we have in the BMW – around 500 litres with the seats up.
Anyway, on to the driving experience. The car that I got to drive was a 71-plate standard RSQ3 (they come in standard, Sport Edition and Vorsprung Edition apparently) in slightly swoopier Sportback guise in black with silver wheels and trimmings. It looked nowhere near as nice as the grey one in the showroom. On silver 20-inch wheels and with the squashed back, it looked oddly tippy-toed where the grey one had looked so planted.
Now this was the usual 20 minute West London bimble rather than a proper test drive, but my impressions were:
- It’s really very quick if you floor it, particularly off the line.
- Good visibility.
- In Comfort mode (and this car didn’t have the RS Sports exhaust that the higher two trims have) it was barely audible and it generally slurs along quietly and uneventfully
- In Dynamic mode it is much sharper and sounded much more aggressive and interesting, but sadly not anything like as hilariously characterful and warbling as the RS3 I tried before buying the 440i. In fact the thrum it emits as it downshifts to a stop at a traffic light reminded me of nothing so much as an old Beetle. Perhaps the RS sports exhaust would improve that.
- Controls are light-ish and nothing particular to write home about. The paddle-shifters are another cheap-feeling element of the cabin.
- The ride is very firm at all times – this one had passive dampers and I reckon you’d have to have the active ones – but no creaks or rattles.
- Very difficult to get any sense of the handling on a drive like this but it turned in keenly enough.
Overall, I did like it. It’s a very appealingly-sized and well-packaged car, in non-Sportback guise with blacked-out trim it looks really rather good, and it goes like stink. But it doesn’t sound nearly as nice as I hoped (to be fair, neither does any of the new Macans) and the interior quality is really disappointing for a car that, specified as I would like, costs £65k.
That’s £10k cheaper than a Macan GTS specified to my liking, which is not an inconsiderable amount, but if you can afford it, the Macan GTS easily feels like £10k more car, and if you can’t then I think I’d still go for a Macan S.
My wife is keen that whatever car we get next should be no larger than our current car, and she’d be happiest if it could be a bit smaller in terms of overall length and general wieldiness. Being short, she finds the low-slung 440i with its long bonnet difficult to manoeuvre. We are also both keen that it should come with “surround view”, having seen this in action in my sister’s Passat GTE and realised it would be very handy, particularly in Italy where the streets in the old town around our flat are very tight and so is access to our garage.
This led me to the RSQ3. Largely because it’s almost exactly the right size, being usefully shorter (4.5m) and narrower than our current car, but taller…and equipped with an engine I really liked when I tried in an RS3 a few years ago. But the road test reviews are not raving about it, so I was a bit sceptical.
Anyhow.
I had a good nose around a Sport Edition in Daytona Grey (nice) with 21” black alloys (less nice) and a pano roof that they had in the showroom. I’m not always a big fan of Audi’s recent design efforts but I definitely like the exterior design overall – it looks just the right sort of chunky with a planted four-square stance and it’s a more cohesive effort than the larger Q5 if you ask me. In grey with black trimmings and red calipers, it looked just the right degree of tasty without being too excessively boy-racer.
The doors feel weighty, and open and close with a reassuringly expensive and muffled thunk. But - and it feels odd to say this about an Audi – the quality of the interior fixtures and fittings is very mixed and really isn’t good enough. It’s a relatively smart-looking interior at first glance, albeit a bit messy-looking compared to the restrained ergonomics of past generations of Audis. The steering wheel feels nice, the colour screens are bright, modern and attractive (although the touch-screen irritates – the rotary iDrive control that BMW use is a much better solution), the metal-finished switchgear feels nice, the leather feels like leather (although I’m not crazy about diamond-quilting) and there are judiciously used fillets of alcantara here and there, but the majority of the plastics look and feel cheap. As in, they’d look cheap in a £30-40k car. In a £60k car, they are verging on unforgivable. The door cards are particularly barren-looking expanses of dark grey plastic and the base mouldings of the seats where the rather rudimentary electric seat controls sit, look like they could have come from something like a Seat Ibiza. This car costs as much as an optioned-up Macan S and even a basic Macan without a leather dashboard feels night and day more premium inside.
That said, for a car that’s only 4.5m long, it was surprisingly spacious and comfortable inside (more so in the back seat than the larger Macan) with a reasonably-sized boot that looks on par with what we have in the BMW – around 500 litres with the seats up.
Anyway, on to the driving experience. The car that I got to drive was a 71-plate standard RSQ3 (they come in standard, Sport Edition and Vorsprung Edition apparently) in slightly swoopier Sportback guise in black with silver wheels and trimmings. It looked nowhere near as nice as the grey one in the showroom. On silver 20-inch wheels and with the squashed back, it looked oddly tippy-toed where the grey one had looked so planted.
Now this was the usual 20 minute West London bimble rather than a proper test drive, but my impressions were:
- It’s really very quick if you floor it, particularly off the line.
- Good visibility.
- In Comfort mode (and this car didn’t have the RS Sports exhaust that the higher two trims have) it was barely audible and it generally slurs along quietly and uneventfully
- In Dynamic mode it is much sharper and sounded much more aggressive and interesting, but sadly not anything like as hilariously characterful and warbling as the RS3 I tried before buying the 440i. In fact the thrum it emits as it downshifts to a stop at a traffic light reminded me of nothing so much as an old Beetle. Perhaps the RS sports exhaust would improve that.
- Controls are light-ish and nothing particular to write home about. The paddle-shifters are another cheap-feeling element of the cabin.
- The ride is very firm at all times – this one had passive dampers and I reckon you’d have to have the active ones – but no creaks or rattles.
- Very difficult to get any sense of the handling on a drive like this but it turned in keenly enough.
Overall, I did like it. It’s a very appealingly-sized and well-packaged car, in non-Sportback guise with blacked-out trim it looks really rather good, and it goes like stink. But it doesn’t sound nearly as nice as I hoped (to be fair, neither does any of the new Macans) and the interior quality is really disappointing for a car that, specified as I would like, costs £65k.
That’s £10k cheaper than a Macan GTS specified to my liking, which is not an inconsiderable amount, but if you can afford it, the Macan GTS easily feels like £10k more car, and if you can’t then I think I’d still go for a Macan S.
