Audi is celebrating seven years in
India. We asked for a good time, and the nice folk there offered us two
hotties. Yes, rubber was burnt
There is little doubt that the A7 is the
best looking Audi, and arguably the best looking German car, that you can lay
your hands, or your eyes on today. For those of you humming and hawing, well,
save your breath because, a) whatever other car that you have thought of, it is
the wrong one; and b) I call the shots. The only car that can put up a fair
challenge here, in fact, is another A7 – one which has an ‘Arr’ and an ‘Ess’ in
its name. In case you haven’t spelt it out for yourself or guessed from the
pictures, it is the RS7 and for those of you who thought about it, to refute my
earlier point about the best looking Audi, well, my apologies, smarty pants.
The
Audi RS7 is designed to offer the performance and capabilities of the RS6 Avant
in a sleeker, more desirable coupé-looking bodystyle
Now that we’ve established that these are
the best looking cars out there, let’s move on. The A7, with its ‘Sportback’
design, as Audi call it, is essentially a four-door coupe with the
underpinnings of an A6. The result works wonderfully well in just about every
sort of situation. While you are pottering around the city, it can carry four
in absolute comfort, although headroom for the rear seat passengers is in short
supply (read as, make average sized friends to put in the back seat). The ride
is plush and in case you come across a particularly large obstacle, say a
zebra, you can raise the suspension over its already impressive ride height to
make sure you keep the underbelly from scraping any bit off it, leaving the
said zebra with all its stripes intact.
The
Audi A7 is an intriguing blend of style and smoothness
Moreover, you get a superbly refined
3.0-litre diesel engine which makes over 240bhp to ensure the A7 has enough
poke to keep up with its coupe character. The cabin is all leather and wood
with the MMI taking centre stage to control everything from climate control to
the car’s dynamic settings apart from the obvious entertainment system
controls. It even has a menu to select what sort of massage you’d like from the
carefully tucked away fingers in the seatback, which come to life at a press of
the MMI knob, while you tackle the harsh realities of life and urban traffic
chaos. And, of course, the best bit of all, a little spoiler pops up when you
are going fast enough (past 120kph), or if you so please, at the push of a
button even when you are standing still.
At
a glance the RS7’s cabin looks suitably premium, but some materials and
plastics are of a lower quality than expected
Simply put, the A7 is a cool car which can
get a move on when you want to. It is a typical self-driven sort of car for the
young entrepreneur who has made it big and wants to splurge a bit, while not
looking too out of line and maintaining enough sanity for a family of four. It
gathers pace briskly in a straight line clocking 100kph in 6.5 seconds and
doesn’t do too badly around corners once you’ve set it to the dynamic mode. A
coupe with the entire package then, is the A7.
Not quite. You need to slap on a ‘RS’ badge
with some red paint, put on some flashy/ridiculous 21-inch wheels with brushed-alloy
finish and, most importantly, get a coat of paint in a dull grey, finished in
matte. In layman’s terms, there is a RS7 to reckon with before you can be so
bold and bestow the A7 with any more praise.
Step
inside and the spacious, high quality interior of the A7 still impresses
For starters, the RS7 is pretty much
exactly the same car as the A7, except it sits lower on its haunches, has a
menacing-dark theme to its exteriors, including the headlamps, has massive air
scoops at the bottom of the front bumper and an air diffuser under the rear
one. It has an interior appointed with Alcantara and carbon-fibre inlays,
sports seats to cocoon you as you push around corners, a golf ball on top of
the gear selector and a flat bottomed steering wheel just so you don’t miss the
fast bits. That, apart from the many ‘RS’ badges littered around the cabin.
