What a car! My business partner and I both dropped our RS 6s in this morning (his for 10k service, mine for a slight oil 'weeping' from a gasket) and have been loaned a new A8 4.2 with most of the optional extras it's possible to get. I'm seriously impressed.

The car is an Aurora (sp?) Blue (but it looks grey to a casual glance) 4.2 with sport seats, sport suspension, Nav, cellphone, 4-zone heating, rear blind and other stuff that I haven't had time to find yet.

Performance is obviously lacking compared to the RS 6, but if I can remember back to early December correctly, it seems to be as fast (if not slightly faster) than the S8 was.

What really impresses is the electronics. Now, I've seen a new A8 last October and I've driven one for an hour at Millbrook, but I'm still awed by the technology in this car.

We found the phone handset under the centre arm-rest and put my phone's SIM in and were prompted for the PIN code. We entered that and after a 30 seconds of searching it locked onto my network with a good signal. A quick test call to my voicemail confirmed that it works.

Next we had a blast of the Bose demo CD. Dubious content, but no denying the quality. The DSP allows you to set the sound stage up to focus around the driver, front, rear or whole car, and the bass is quite good although noisy sources like radio or badly mastered CDs will create a bit of distortion. A cleanly mastered CD should be Ok though. It's slightly less bassy than the RS 6 (which really produces some boom), but good enough for a car system.

Then we had a little play with the nav. The DVD redraws so much faster than the CD based Nav+ system. It's possible to scroll the cursor with the MMI wheel and rather than page flipping (as Nav+ does), it scrolls quite smoothly. The resolution of the main map and the in-dash display is incredible. The maps are much more readable than the Nav+ ones.

Now we get to the interesting bit - there's a little button on the steering wheel that doesn't have an obvious function. Press it and it goes "Beep" and nothing appears to happen. Odd, perhaps it's part of the adaptive cruise? Press it again and it goes "beep" again. Then something unexpected happens.

The car says "Pardon?" in a polite female voice.

Oh, this is good. This is voice command. Press the button and say "Navigation" and up pops navigation on MMI and you are asked if you want to plan a route. Yes please! Next you are asked for the country, and "Great Britain" is recognised. Next, we're asked to spell out the town name. "L i n c o l n" and up comes a numbered list of towns, with Lincoln at the top and we're prompted to pick one. "1" is recognised and then we're asked to specify street in the same way, then we're asked if we want to specify a house number. Once we've defined a destination, route guidance kicks in automatically.

So, can we control the phone as well? Press the button and say "Phone". "Telephone" the A8 confirms, followed by "Please enter number". "01522" (with no pauses) and after a second, the A8 responds with "Zero one five two two, please continue". The rest of the phone number is recognised just as quickly. This car does not need you to pause between each letter or number, and this is with two new (and excited) occupants, so it won't have performed any voice learning it might be able to do. The phone recognises a complete number and then we just say "Dial" and it does.

A bit more playing reveals that if you pause during saying a number and it asks you to continue, if you goof the next bit and the number is incorrectly recognised, you can just say "Delete" and it will only delete the section of number you last said - any previously recognised sections will still be in the display! That means you can say the area code, pause and then say the rest of the number. That's good user interface design, very good.

The sound is handled through the speakers and a built in microphone, but the handset is Bluetooth enabled and can be used for private conversations. The handset display reflects the network, signal strength and current selected number and call status. Good stuff.

We're heading out on a motorway run for a couple of hours soon and will be returning this evening, so we can have a bit more of a play. I'm hoping I can have it for a couple of days later in the month to try my rural commute to test the handling and get better acquainted with the car, but for now I'm completely stunned by it.

Now I'm between a rock and a hard place - The speed and handling of the RS 6 or the luxury and gadgetry of the new A8? I could probably have one within 5-6 weeks and I could probably sell the RS 6 for around what I paid for it, even with 10k miles on it...

 

It seems quite the ticket, but one must wonder how much of the gadgetry will make it to the US?

 

behind the curve on some of this technology. As a brit (not TheBrit) living in the US but visiting the UK often this is disappointing. I just spent 8 days in the UK and drove 1,000 miles and I cannot remember seeing one person holding a cell phone to their ear while driving. Everybody has proper hands free.

 

We hate you. (Cool write-up, sir.)

 

Space Shuttle?

 

It's unconscionable to buy an Audi and have an Enterprise Rent-a-POS Ford Focus to drive while they butcher your car.

However, they seem to sell Porsche and BMW too so their business model must be viable and I'm all wet.

 

Short wheelbase (vs. long only in N.A.) A8? Oh man, I'm soooooo envious. Very, very nice. Thanks.

 

Pretty much rules out an RS6 then, huh?

 

dropped the s8 in for a service and went out for a drive in the rs6...

love the power of the car, not sure about the handling though, particularly the lack of feel...

dave
'01 s8

 

We travelled South from Lincoln to Letchworth this afternoon (about 100 miles), my business partner drove while I played with MMI and this evening I drove back and he played with MMI.

About ten minutes after setting off and fiddling with MMI and the voice command system, I was convinced. I want one, no question.

The voice command system makes it so damn easy to use. Each mode (Nav, Radio, CD, Phone etc) recognises between half a dozen to a dozen commands, for example Nav supports commands for entering destinations on the move like "Specify Town", "Specify Street" and "Start guidance" and generic commands like "Zoom in", "Scale 1 mile" and "Dynamic guidance on (or off)".

The radio supports giving voice tags to stations, then you can just ask for a station by tag and it's recognised and tuned. CD mode can be selected and "Next track" and "Previous CD" and suchlike commands can be used. The car we had didn't have TV (it had just about everything else) so I can't say how that works, but I'd expect it to be similar.

The MMI setup of the car systems is comprehensive. We set it up for auto-locking doors, convinience windows and enabled the advanced key so we could just walk up to the car, climb in and press 'Start' to get driving. The A/C controls for front and rear can be accessed via MMI (with the optional 4-zone A/C) so even if your last set of rear passengers set a stupid temperature, you can fix it from the driving seat and switch off seat heating etc.

The rear electric blind kept putting itself up when starting the car, which perplexed us until we realised it had detected brighter light levels behind the car than in front and had assumed that the blind would be handy. We figured out how to disable that functionality, but it's a pretty neat feature.

The trunk had the soft opening and auto closing feature. Just press a recessed button on the trunk lid's grab handle and it opens itself slowly. Press a button on the lid and it closes itself too.

The trip computer has two memories so that you can maintain a long-term set of stats and also have a per-trip memory as well. About time too, I had a GM car (I'm sorry) about 5 years ago that could do this.

The Nav unit supports TMC (traffic info) and could recognise radio stations sending TMC data, but for some reason it kept claiming that TMC was not available, much to our annoyance. I suspect the road map DVD may not be TMC encoded. Still, at least this recognises a new road near where I live that's been there for at least 5 years, unlike the RS 6's 2002 CD.

Speaking of radio stations, the radio supports programme types (on FM via RDS), so if you don't like country music then just select every other type on the PTY filter and when your chosen station advertises it's playing country, the radio will seek to another station with a different programme type. The radio display screen shows a scrolling list of all stations it can recognise with RDS data, listed by name with current programme type so you know what's playing right now. We wanted to catch the BBC Radio 4 news, so we kept the radio screen up with the sound down while it stated "Drama" as the programme type, then turned up the sound when it changed to "News" and the news was indeed starting.

We also had a good play with the air suspension. Because this car has sport suspension, the overall level of height adjustment is reduced, but according to the manual, the lowest ride height is 95mm, which is selected automatically when driving at over 120km/h for more than 30 seconds, regardless of which suspension is fitted. Unless sport suspension has better anti-roll characteristics, I can't immediately see why standard suspension on Dynamic wouldn't be as good. I'll have to ask more questions about that.

Well, I'm sure there's more I forgot about, but that's the things that really stood out today. When I've got more time to play (when I'm not rushing off to a meeting or something), I'll try and borrow it again and get some pictures of the MMI features (the quality of the in-dash nav display has to be seen to be believed!).

Once I (sadly) dropped it off at the dealer and picked up my RS 6 I was finding myself wondering how long the lead times would be and what colour I'd like. Then I drove home in the RS 6. I want to keep it, no question.

Umm, but I want an A8. But I still want an RS 6. I know I'll get no sympathy for my 'predicament', but it's still not a great choice to have to face up to. It might come down to how much over list I can get for a 10,000 mile RS6 and how much discount off list I can get for a fully loaded A8...