Audi A8 2013: First Drive

Regardless of what any other premium car company exec tells you, the one they’re all concerned about in the large luxury world is the same one they’ve all been chasing for 30 years: Mercedes-Benz’s S-Class.

Bentley thinks about the biggest Benz sedan when it revamps the Flying Spur, BMW thinks of little else whenever it touches the 7 Series and Jaguar and Maserati can both be seen at the back of the room, jumping up and down with their hands in the air to try to get comparative attention from the world’s be-suited director types.

So when Mercedes launches a new S-Class (as it has just done), the world’s nicer car parks get swamped with updates of everyone else’s leather and wood cruise liners, too. In the weeks either side of the S-Class launch we saw BMW’s 7 Series get a tickle and the Jaguar XJ got a polish, too.  

And the last of the heavyweights to bring its guns to bear on the S-Class is Audi, which calls its facelifted A8 the sportiest machine in the large, luxury category, though nobody who has driven a current Maserati Quattroporte will swallow that one.

It calls its interior the most stylish in the business, too, and that claim’s much harder to argue with, even in the face of all of Mercedes-Benz’s double-screen trickery and massage chairs. Whatever else it is, the A8 is the largest of the standard luxury offerings, with 5.134 metres of overall length (or 5.265 metres in long-wheelbase form).

The overall upshot of Audi’s counter-S-Class engineering is a new A8 that delivers extremely clever LED headlights, slightly more power, marginally lower fuel consumption, a head-up display (proclaimed an innovation a full 20 years after you could get the same thing in a Nissan Bluebird SSS) and small changes to the bodywork that can be seen if you’re up quite close. And you’re squinting.

There are some creases in the new bonnet and the new boot lid that weren’t there before and both the nose and tail are a bit squarer. One of the key reasons for that is to house the A8’s new headlights and the tweaked tail-lights, which score the R8’s funky progressive LED indicators.

It’s all based around Audi’s vaunted aluminium framework yet for all Audi’s talk of lightweight engineering, the biggest selling A8 is the 3.0-litre TDI quattro version, which weighs 1880kg. That’s about 40kg heavier than the equivalent 730d BMW and it’s thirstier and slower, too, but at least it’s 75kg lighter than the S 350 diesel Mercedes.

Audi delivers essentially the same engine line-up as before (and the same eight-speed automatic transmission) but with a bit more of everything. It starts with the big-selling 3.0-litre turbo-diesel V6 (it’s about two-thirds of the A8’s European sales volume) and a turbo-diesel 4.1-litre V8 (which Audi calls a 4.2).

Then it switches to petrol power, with a 3.0-litre supercharged V6, a 4.0-litre turbo V8 (in both the base car and, with more everything, the S8) and it tops the whole thing out with a 6.1-litre W12 motor.

Of these offerings, you can forget all about the 6.1-litre W12 because it’s just silly and nobody buys it. Rightly so. In its efforts to deliver sportiness, Audi gave the facelifted version a ride with so much vertical impact that you’d barely credit that it has the same chassis as the rest of the range. Its engine is obviously strong, but the more sophisticated V8 in the S8 makes similar power and uses less fuel doing it.

While we’re covering off A8s that nobody buys, there’s also a hybrid, combining a 2.0-litre turbo-petrol engine and an electric motor for 180kW of total power and an NEDC figure of 6.3L/100km. It’s capable of a limited distance (Audi claims 3km) of pure electric running and it happens to also be the only front-drive A8 in the range.

And now to more important A8s. Audi uses the supercharged petrol V6, which started life in the Audi S5, to produce its lightest A8. At 1905kg, the V6 is an all-wheel drive machine that generates 228kW of power. Audi suggests the all-paw V6 will use 7.6L/100km on the combined cycle for a 183g/km emissions figure, but there wasn’t one available to drive at the launch.

Still, it’s had a few tweaks, with Audi figuring a way to switch off the supercharger when it’s not needed, combining both direct and indirect fuel-injection and taking weight out of the crankshaft to give it 15kW more than it had before.

Above that, there is the 4.0-litre V8 with 320kW of power (a lift of 11kW) and 600Nm of torque. This so-called mid-range engine still heaves the 1995kg car to 100km/h in 4.5 seconds. If you think that’s impressive, the S8 has 382kW and gets to 100km/h in 4.1 seconds.

Our first test machine was this very S8. Though it wasn’t launched that long ago, the S8 gets more power and torque and feels hugely composed most of the time.

It uses noise cancellation technology to help tune the fabulous note coming from the twin-turbo V8. The biggest issue with the car is that, for all the technical tweaks and accuracy coming from the five-link front suspension layout, the steering wheel still doesn’t respond in any way that resembles the word “sporty”.

It’s too vague, with very little self-centring in the comfort and automatic settings, and choosing dynamic just adds heft and a touch more feel.

To offset this, it delivers a better ride than it had before and it’s more composed in faster corners. And it hammers. The V8 is silken at every part of its rev range and even though the automatic can lull you into thinking it’s just a big, comfy cruiser, the bottom end of the throttle pedal’s travel will convince you otherwise every time you visit. It’s a proper fast machine and it will push out to an indicated 268km/h, even though Audi says it’s limited to 250.

We looked in vain for Audi’s V6 TFSI A8s to drive, so settled for the big-selling V6 TDI A8s -- and you can see why they’ve found a following in northern Europe.

It’s a strong contender, with 190kW of power (a 6kW jump on the outgoing model) pulling 1955kg. The headline act of the V6 TDI’s show, though, is the 30Nm lift in torque, to 580Nm between 1750 and 2500rpm. It also uses half a litre less per 100km (now 5.9L/100km) and emits 14 g/km of CO2 less (now 155g/km).

This engine is smooth, too, and realistically it’s more than enough motor for just about every A8 customer. Stick a V8 badge on it somewhere and most people would be comfortable enough with it.

That’s because it feels light enough to leap away strongly from just about any speed, with enough straight-line speed to hit 100km/h in 5.9 seconds, even if that is less relevant than its no-nonsense in-gear acceleration. And the engine is never ruffled by the work it’s being asked to do.

The same can’t be said of the suspension, which is not as cosseting as you might expect at this end of the market. Maybe it’s the sporty demeanour, but it feels like the front-end is in an arm wrestle with every transverse bump and it often loses loudly. There’s a slight jiggliness to the front-end that’s disappointing (though it’s far worse on the W12), but the handling is always terrifically secure and the body control is a step up.

Step up to the V8 TDI and you know you’ve found the car the Audi engineers loved the most. This car clearly feels like it’s had the most lavish and loving attention paid to it out of everything in the range, including the S8.

The 4.1-litre V8 has been granted another 25kW of power to top out at 253kW and it crunches out 850Nm of torque from a paltry 2000rpm.

It’s strong, then -- strong enough to launch to 100km/h in 4.7 seconds, even though it weighs 2115kg. But it’s not the speed of the 4.2 TDI that impresses the most. It’s the composure.

Where the V6 diesel feels too lightly controlled at the front-end, the V8 feels like the entire range’s envelope was designed around it. It feels like every piece of the A8 range pivots around this engine and even though the V6 is more than adequate for most people, it’s the V8 that’s the star of the show. Probably because this is the one the Audi board members drive. Or get driven in.

It’s so smooth that it barely needs the noise cancelling set-up. It’s so controlled over the front-end that you can barely believe you’re crossing the same bumps that slightly unsettled the V6. It’s so fast, everywhere, all the time, that you find yourself looking across at the S8 and wondering why.

Then there are the interiors. Where buyers can perceive Audi suspensions as riding too firmly (and, with the V6 TDI, they’re right), they also usually perceive Audi as the leaders in interior quality. And they’re also right.

It delivers the class’s most logical multi-media system. It has the low-seat, high-dash driving position that makes you feel part of the architecture. It has magnificent seats and the most intuitive dash switches and instruments in the class. And the addition of new materials for the dash, seats and trims will only cement that reputation.

Yes, the new A8 is more of the same, but each model we drove was incrementally better than its predecessor. Only the poor steering feels like a let-down and, even then, the feeling is probably magnified by the fact the rest of the car is just so impressive.

And, if you really want an A8 instead of an S-Class, a 7 Series, a Quattroporte or an XJ, do yourself a favour and drive the V8 TDI, in either 4.1- or 4.2-litre forms.

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