Recently I had a car in at a dealer getting an engine warning light, and check engine light sorted, I was told it might take an hour…or longer, so they had a loan car sorted for me as it turned out to be the latter.
I was given an Audi S4 45 TFSI quattro, which according to the rego was a 2020 model.
The car I was leaving with the car dealer / mechanic wasn't an Audi, and this was the first Audi I'd driven.
Starting the car up it initially seemed a little unsettled, but as I drove it, this feeling seemed to go away completely.
Upon leaving the car dealer I didn't really take it for a drive, I departed for home; driving in the city's inner suburbs and then mostly on the freeway home, driving for a bit more than an hour.
Steering was very light.
My every day vehicle is a 2018 Ford Ranger Wildtrak.
I sort of will use it as a yardstick to the Audi, mostly because it's my every day vehicle and it's comparable in production year, more so than the car that was being fixed.
My Ford Ranger has these driving aids; radar guided cruise control, speed detection in the dash, lane keeping assist.
Additionally in cabin it has sun visors that slide (so you can cover the whole window), Apple CarPlay and a touch screen.
What the Audi A4 doesn't have is the odd thing.
It didn't have a touchscreen. While it does have Apple CarPlay, you control it via a wheel / dial control in the centre console. While the wheel is also a circular D-pad control type sort of thing depending on the menu you have to mostly use it as a wheel to move around rather than a D-pad.
The Audi A4 does have radar guided cruise control…and that's it as far as I could tell. It's also got some sort of radar guided safety system, it kept flashing a red light in the instrument cluster when I got too close to a car in front, which I couldn't work out how to disable so I just ignored it.
It does not have lane keeping assist. But it does have blind spot assist (which my Ranger does not have). It's in the form of a large orange square light on the side of the wing mirrors that gets quickly annoying. The wing mirrors are also a very odd shape, contorting the available space to see stuff in it in odd ways.
The sun visors in the Audi also feel weirdly light and plasticky, and they don't slide, which was surprising, considering how big the doors / window glass is compared to the sun visors.
The whole dash was air vents. It was an interesting design choice, which I'm not sure I liked.
It had a digital instrument cluster, which was fine it's probably something I would get used to if I drove this car, but it looked like it needed some shading or something adding to the dials just to give it some sense of depth and reality. They looked dated in an odd way.
There's a digital instrument cluster in my Ford Ranger and if I was being optimistic I'd say it's practical. It's got an analogue display which is in the middle and a digital display to the right. It's practical, but looked a little dated when I bought it. But functional, and now it's…functional.
Unfortunately in the Audi it looks modern, in a sort of late 2010s sort of way.
The view interface is fine, it's very smooth, it's just not very….I don't know. It's functional, but sort of stylistically functional, enough thought has been put into it that it most definitely is designed but…it's sort of trying to straddle the unreality and realness and not quite doing it.
The display in my Ranger is functional, but it's not trying to be anything other than a functional gauge (although the digital circular rev counter display in the Ranger is also terrible in a pretend sort of way).
On the instrument stalks there's also some oddness.
The indicator stalk was very firm, I felt it required too much force to engage.
Audi also seemed to have eschewed dials/rings on the instrument stalks for switches. Such as on the cruise control stalk, to adjust the radar guided cruise control distance (from the car in front) it's this lever switch that you click up and down.
On my Ford Ranger it's buttons on the steering wheel.
And on the windscreen wiper stalk to advance the speed is a switch to be rocked left to right.
These switches feel like you need to brace the stalks when adjusting them.
The two "real" displays on the instrument cluster are temperature and fuel, which are indicated by lights along the side. It's an…interesting choice, that sort of interrupted the clean look of the instrument cluster. But I guess there's some utility to having non-screen-based gauges.
The interior was very ergonomic, with my arm on the centre arm rest the volume knob and other controls were easy to hand.
I could imagine this being a good car for tedious drives to and from work and other places.
The centre arm rest also has a wireless charging plate to charge your phone. I used Apple CarPlay to connect my phone rather than messing around with bluetooth to connect to different car.
Which means I didn't experience much of the Audi menu system (aside from discovering the lack of a touchscreen).
On my drive back to the dealer I discovered that the location of the wireless charging plate (in the centre arm rest) did not allow for very good airflow, resulting in my phone overheating just before my arrival. A not great thing considering I needed it to scan in for the COVID QR check-in code upon arrival back at the dealer.
The speakers were really good, and I could hear a subwoofer somewhere in the rear. I heard stuff in some of my music I'd not heard outside of listening on a stereo at home or with good headphones.
On the whole it's a very good...'car'. It was perfectly fine to drive, it's well designed where it needs to be, with some odd quirks. It just didn't have much personality, it'd be a great company car, or as I was using it loan car.