Audi A4 Races Athletes Down World’s Steepest Street

By Derek Shiekhi - March 3, 2016

Audi A4 Steepest Street Commercial 2

What do you picture when you hear the name Audi? Perhaps an R8 cruising along the French Riviera? Maybe an RS6 blasting across the Autobahn in Germany?

How about an A4 quattro going up a street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? Probably not, but that’s exactly what you’ll see in the following commercial, The Steepest Street.

Canton Avenue isn’t just a boring pedestrian strip of pavement, though. With a 37-degree grade, it’s the world’s steepest street that the public is allowed to drive on. To showcase the capabilities of the quattro all-wheel drive system on its new A4, Audi gives one of the cars to DTM driver Mattias Ekström. He proceeds to take it and some friends up the road multiple times and over different surfaces, such as snow, dirt, and gravel.

Once at the top, Ekström drops off freestyle skier Bene Mayr, snowboarder Heikki Sorsa, US downhill world champion mountain-biker Aaron Gwin….so he can race them in the A4 downhill. Can you picture Audi going all the way to a place like Canton Avenue and not zooming down it? Of course not.