Audi SQ7 2016 Review - International

Audi SQ7    
International Launch
Basel, Switzerland

At the comfort end of the large premium SUV world sits the imperious Range Rover. At the sports level sits the harder of the Porsche Cayennes. Others slot in to various points between the two, with mixed success. Nobody ever dreamed of doing both things equally well at the same time, until the high-tech SQ7 came along.

Car-makers usually prefer their new technologies to be of the in-your-face kind, if for no other reason than to remind you why you upgraded from your old car and to show you “See, haven’t we been busy?”.

Usually, but not always. The Audi SQ7 isn’t like that. It delivers quite probably the biggest step-change in technology the luxury SUV world has seen in decades, but you wouldn’t know about it unless you deliberately went looking for it.

Instead, when it arrives here in October, you’ll find an SUV that costs $160,000 (just under, actually, or more than the cost of an A3 over, depending on your options), seats seven, gallops quickly and urgently in a straight line, sounds good and is whisper quiet.

It also promises to ride like a Range Rover and handle every bit as well as a Cayenne or an X5M. Maybe even better.

It’s also one of the most complete, coherent, all-purpose machines money can buy.

There are a select few big SUVs that corner reasonably well (because of the limitations of mass), especially by low-slung sports car or sports sedan standards. But in the context of the best of them, the SQ7 is a peach of a thing in the winding bits.

Then it’s a peach of a thing again on broken tarmac at low speeds (you know, like most of the cities we live in).

And that’s before we talk about how fast it is in a straight line, and how smoothly and cleverly it delivers its engine’s 900Nm of torque.

In a dazzling array of new technologies, two of them stand out on the SQ7 – and they stand out as much for their seamless integration into the rest of the car and how it runs as they do for how clever they are.

Firstly, it introduces a new kind of anti-roll bar. Effectively, instead of each axle having an anti-roll bar linking one side’s suspension to the other, the SQ7 effectively gives each wheel its own anti-roll bar, so the ride can be wonderfully soft. When it needs to stiffen up for hard cornering work, it stiffens up to almost become a traditional anti-roll bar again.

This all happens because instead of solid or tubular anti-roll bars across the car, the SQ7 uses one shorter anti-roll bar at each corner, then pairs up the front and rear bars together via small electric motors.

These motors each use a three-stage planetary gearbox that separates the torque tubes one side of the electric motor from the other. The gearboxes help the tubes to twist against each other with up to 1200Nm of torque in faster driving, but are disconnected when the car’s cruising to improve the ride quality.

Besides being new, it’s also lighter and smaller than mechanical anti-roll bar systems, and it’s governed by the same computer that makes all the decisions for the active dampers, the air springs, the (optional) sports differential and the four-wheel steering.

Oh, and its power demands are so high Audi gave the SQ7 a 48-volt power system to drive it. It’s optional in Australia, and Audi won’t say how much the option will be (largely because it’s still working on pricing), but it’s going to be a significant chunk of change.

Even if you don’t use the optional system (if you can afford it, we’d urge you to tick the box), the car will still get the 48-volt power supply, which runs in parallel to the usual 12-volt set-up and has its own small 470Wh lithium-ion battery and a DC-DC converter.

The main reason it still gets the 48-volt system is because it’s a handy thing to have when you want to do the SQ7’s other big trick.

The new 4.0-litre V8 diesel engine gets a pair of turbochargers, sitting inside the hot-vee. Then it sort-of gets another one. Technically, what it gets is an Electrically-Powered Compressor (EPC in Audi-speak) to force-feed air through the mechanical turbochargers when they’re not already working hard.

The EPC, which spins with up to 7kW of power, can hit 70,000 rpm within a quarter of a second after a standing start and Audi claims it’s the thing to have to eliminate turbo lag and to drastically shrink spool-up time from idle.

Those aren’t the new motor’s only tricks, though, because the fuel is now delivered at up to 2500 bar, while it’s the first diesel engine to use Audi’s variable valve timing and lift system.

There’s more, but that’s the basic step-change stuff covered off. The result is 320kW of power and 900Nm of torque – and that’s delivered in a flat line from just 1000rpm. It thumps through to 100km/h in 4.9 seconds and Audi reins it in at 250km/h.

While it’s not the strongest Q7 ever (the old, rare, 6.0-litre V12 TDI had 1000Nm), it’s easily the most sophisticated.

Audi targeted the performance figures of machines like the Range Rover Sport SVR and, to really understand how well it has done, consider that the SQ7 is 0.1 seconds slower to 100km/h than the fastest Rangie, but with 194 grams of CO2/km, it slashes the British car’s CO2 emissions by 100 grams.

It’s a phenomenally complete motor car in ways that seem greater than just delivering fast-SUV performance with 3.0-litre TDI economy.

Its look is more purposeful than the unfortunately styled stock Q7, with a dark grille, bigger air intakes and four rectangular exhaust pipes lurking at the back, beneath the subtle roof spoiler.

The interior is as luxurious as you’d expect, building off the excellent stock Q7 cabin with its virtual cockpit digital dashboard and adding some quilted leather seating and higher quality materials throughout.

Australia will only take the seven-seat layout, which adds to its weight (now up to 2330kg, which is why it’s 0.1 seconds slower to 100km/h than the five-seater), but it’s a proper seven-seater. You can Isofix the child seats into the last row, so the spare adults don’t have to climb over into the luggage area anymore.

And the middle row of seating is comfortable, quiet and full of legroom and headroom, with plenty of vision, all of which is what you’d expect with a wheelbase of 2996mm, or as near as dammit to three metres.

Now, there are some caveats to what follows: our test car rode on 22-inch Hankook rubber, with wafer-thin 35-profile sidewalls, where Australian SQ7s will take a stock 20-inch package, though it expects a 100 per cent take up of either 21- or 22-inch wheels (and though I might have just made up that percentage figure, it’ll end up being shockingly accurate).

It also stopped with ferociously big and expensive carbon-ceramic brakes, which will be optional, and had the electro-mechanical sports differential, which is also optional.

Still, Audi Oz has fed it with the same spec as the 200kW version of the Q7, then bunged in extra standard gear, like the active air suspension and adaptive sound (also known as exhaust tuning), but don’t expect a lot of change out of $200,000 for a spec like the one we tested in the borderlands of France, Germany and Switzerland.

That’s priced like either a very good luxury car or a very good performance car. The SQ7 is an excellent version of both breeds, rolled into one hefty package.

Its engine is disturbingly quiet in its standard mode, starting in a deep whisper and never rising to any great heights of menace, but delivering solid, smooth, sharp performance without ever intruding on the cabin’s goings-on.

The sport mode brings the exhaust into play, changing it to a shorter pipe and amplifying it through the cabin. Still, it’s not as loud as we hoped for inside, even if the tone is more aggressive and the entire performance feels more urgent.

Audi claims the new EPC compressor eliminates turbo lag. In reality, the actual lag people feel in a modern SUV is more likely to come from the eight-speed automatic transmission stepping down from a cruising gear to a punching gear.

But what the EPC actually does can still be felt, in three distinct areas of the car’s performance.

Firstly, when you step on to the throttle at the traffic lights. Do that with any kind of authority and the SQ7 simply jumps, with no hesitations, until the tacho needle reaches 1300rpm or so, then it hammers ahead. There’s no waiting for the turbochargers to spool up. It just responds to the call and huffs, with the V8 bellowing (much louder from the outside than it is inside).

Then you feel its work mid-corner, in the sport or manual modes, when you’re after finely controlled throttle inputs to balance it or to accelerate out of a bend. Instead of giving you not-enough, then too-much, it just gives you what you ask for in a way that feels almost atmo-engine in its linearity.

The next big area where it’s noticeable (but, again, only if you’re into noticing such things) is cruising on motorways. There, if you need to accelerate from a normal cruising pace, it gives the engine so much more performance at such low revs that it usually doesn’t need to come out of the heavily overdriven eighth gear, so that improves economy and one less downshift never hurts the cabin’s serenity.

It’s a magnificent engine and does magnificent work, spinning out to about 5300rpm before it shifts up to the next gear and cruising at around 1350rpm at 100km/h. That’s right in the heart of the engine’s meat-cleaver zone, which starts at the 1000rpm torque peak (it runs through to 3250rpm) and continues through until the end of the 320kW power peak, which runs from 3750rpm to 5000rpm.

There’s no feeling, though, of a sudden wave of flat torque and then nothing. It pulls hard to the redline, feeling a lot less like a diesel engine and a lot more like an offshore powerboat racer. There’s a linearity to the way it works that rewards revs, while it’s also happy to lurk in its lower speeds, twisting everything out of the way through torque alone.

It’s the gearbox that has the lag now, not the turbo motor, and it has an occasional clunky downshift in the sports mode to demonstrate the strain it’s under. Usually, though, it’s slick and clean in its work.

Its ride quality is also fabulous (though we can’t speak for SQ7s that don’t have the trick anti-roll bar system). There is the occasional nibble from the ultra-thin tyres (285/35 R22) on sharp bump strikes, but you could comfortably iron most of these out by sticking with the stock 20-inch boots or compromising with the 21s. Or you could just live with it, because the nibbles never trend towards uncomfortable. They’re just letting you know there’s something underfoot.

Otherwise, the body control is sensationally clean and good and it moves about with a combination of grace and dignity and sheer togetherness that’s rare in the modern world.

It is disdainful of things like speed bumps or ugly potholes, neither of which leave more than a faint ripple on the surface of water in a bottle, and there is none of the lateral head-toss over mild bumps that is the bane of the drivers of most fast SUVs.

Audi also insists the SQ7 has no understeer, which sounded like a challenge. From our test, we can’t confirm that there is, indeed, no understeer, but we can confirm that we never found it. And that anybody who does find it is being seriously loopy or sloppy.

There are times when you can feel the weight hampering the SQ7, but they are rare, like when you are flicking it through a fast direction change at speeds an MX-5 club racer might baulk at. Other than that, it feels like a car that’s 30cm lower, at least 500kg lighter and no bigger than an A6.

It shrinks around the driver whenever it finds corners, with the suspension hunkering down in a remarkable way that both instils confidence and, by keeping the body roll to a bare minimum, retains its dignity.

There’s a phenomenal coherence to the way it behaves in the bends in sport mode, with the steering feeling about right (though not abounding in nuanced feedback) for speed and weight.

A tightening radius bend, normally the curse of the hefty SUV, is dispatched with utter disdain, with the instant throttle response helping to tuck the nose back in to the later, sharper apex. Savage mid-corner bumps neither unsettle the connection the tyres stubbornly have on the road, nor toss the cabin’s occupants around in their seats.

It’s as though the car’s cruising speed dignity and calmness simply refuses to go away when the driver is picking up the 2.3-tonne machine and hurling it at a mountainside pass. It feeds the weight transfer across the car beautifully, always keeping the driver informed about how much grip is left (its answer is always “more”) and making the impossible seem, well, easy.

It’s difficult to see how you’d crash one of them, except on purpose. Even that is a difficult ask, with 24 standard assistance systems that include lane departure warning, autonomous braking, parking cameras and a watertight skid-control system that’s backed up by astonishing levels of mechanical grip.

But the outright grip and the ability to elicit speed in any corner, in any circumstance, is one thing. It’s fun, it’s stable and it’s a fantastic feat of engineering, but it’s not how you’re going to drive it everyday.

Instead, the impression it leaves you with is one of so many complex technologies working hard, in complete seamless harmony, to impart a wonderful grace-and-pace feeling of dignity and quiet, confident serenity to everybody in the cabin.

It promises to be one of the special ones.

2016 Audi SQ7 pricing and specifications:
On sale: October
Price: Sub-$160,000 (estimated)
Engine: 4.0-litre triple-turbo diesel V8
Output: 320kW/900Nm
Transmission: Eight-speed auto
Fuel: 7.2L/100km
CO2: 190g/km
Safety rating: TBC