Audi TT S 2020 Review
Iconic German sports car still pushes all the right buttons, but rivals are more fun to driveRewind to 1998, when Hypercolour T-shirts were trending and 17-year-old Britney Spears' hit song "Baby One More Time" raced to number one on the ARIA charts. The original Audi TT also made its world premiere that year. With a striking design Bauhaus unlike anything else, the all-new two-door sports car showed that a somewhat conservative German luxury brand was willing to take risks. And it paid off, becoming a design icon that continues today. Form over function? You better believe it!
Expensive and flashy
The Audi TT range is priced from just under $80,000 for the base model but the bright orange beastie on test here is the $99,900 Audi TT S. It gets more power, more features and a tougher look.
At the heart of the matter is a high-performance 2.0-litre turbo-petrol engine (210kW/380N) that pumps through a six-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission. Power is then transferred to all four wheels – via Audi’s quattro AWD system – which are big 19-inch jobbies in this case.
Standard equipment on the Audi TT S includes LED headlights, cool scrolling indicators, a wireless phone charger (that's almost too small for bigger smartphones like the iPhone 8 Plus), digital radio, sat-nav, heated front sports seats finished in Nappa leather and a rather impressive high-fidelity 12-speaker Bang & Olufsen audio system.
But it's perhaps what's missing that's most interesting – a big infotainment screen ruining the sleek lines of the lovingly styled dashboard. Yep, this car has just one screen (it's pretty big at 12.3 inches) and it's tucked away behind the steering wheel.
It won't be to everyone's taste and is a controversial design choice, but personally I love the pared-back interior concept. It says a lot about the car's ethos: time to drive.
Cool tech but safety is lacking
While the current Audi TT was introduced in 2014, it still feels unique in a world full of cookie-cutter designs. The exterior design has had a couple of tweaks here and there to freshen it up, but there's big appeal in the high-tech cabin design.
The heating and cooling controls are intergrated into the air-vents, complete with tiny digital readouts, while other climate controls are elegantly integrated between and below and vents. Infotainment controls are minimal with steering wheel controls covering most of the infotainment functions anyway.
The minimalist approach is still very functional and the result is sophisticated, high-tech and just awesome, in my opinion.
Other safety and tech features include the usual front and side curtain airbags, push-button park brake with auto-hold, parking sensors front and rear, a reversing camera, and a tyre pressure loss indicator.
Drive assistance systems include cruise control and active lane assist, but the latter uses dated software and struggles to keep the car in its lane, making the system pointless. The blind spot detection system works well, however, as do the automatic LED headlights and rain-sensing wipers. And I’ll say it again: the strobing indicators look pretty schmick too.
The Audi TT S scored a four-star Euro NCAP safety rating back in 2015 so by today's standards this car probably wouldn’t pass muster.
It comes as standard with two-stage adaptive dampers (comfort or dynamic modes), which also lower the car 10mm lower than the regular TT model-grade.
A 12-speaker (680W) Bang & Olufsen sound system provides exceptional audio quality in the small cabin and features back-lighting on the front woofers, adding a little eye candy to proceedings.
Punchy engine is efficient too
While the Audi TT was always a design-lead product, it is a sports coupe that needs to offer decent performance.
And it does. Its hopped-up 2.0-litre turbo-petrol four-cylinder engine (210kW/380Nm) conspires with the six-speed twin-clutch automatic transmission to deliver a 250km/h top speed and a 0-100km/h acceleration time of just 4.7 seconds, which is pretty brisk.
Channelled to the ground by all four tyres, there’s enough power to provide an impressive sensation of speed when you nail the throttle in this slightly chubby 1460kg German coupe.
What's more impressive is the car's frugality. On the freeway the TT just tootles along sipping fuel as though it was a finite resource to be rationed. The official fuel consumption claim is 7.0L/100km and while my figure was much higher (11.2L/100km) that was due to hard driving. On the freeway it can be very efficient.
Driving dynamics need work
In terms of open-road driving, the Audi TT S does a good job, but not a great one. In comfort mode, the adaptive suspension makes longer, boring freeway drives comfortable, thanks also to the heated sports seats.
Find a nice twisty piece of road, as we at Arthur's Seat in Victoria (see the video), and the dynamic suspension setting comes to the fore. The car exhibits less body roll through corners and grip levels are excellent. You'd have to be a goose to lose control of this plucky compact coupe.
With its low centre of gravity, punchy turbo engine and direct steering, the Audi TT S fires out of corners with impressive precision. But therein lies the issue with this car – it's dynamically very precise and accurate and fast and engaging… but lacks character.
It defaults to safe and boring understeer when pushed hard. If the quattro system had a rear-axle bias like the Audi RS 5 coupe, I reckon it'd give the Cayman a run for its Euros.
As it stands, I was ready to go home after about 30 minutes of blasting around corners – something that won’t happen in a car like the Porsche Cayman or Jaguar F-TYPE.
It should be said that the Audi TT S redeems its lack of dynamic character (somewhat) with a touch of aural drama in the way it farts and burps like a filthy grub between gearshifts.
Buy it for the design, not the drive
Priced at around $100,000, the Audi TT S is outperformed dynamically by many other vehicles at this price point, such as the tasty new Mercedes-AMG AMG 45 S ($93,600) with its rear-biased AWD system and the satisfying rear-drive BMW M2 Competition ($99,900).
It’s fast and fun, but you also have to wonder whether you're getting bang for your buck with its relatively tame 210kW/380Nm outputs.
However, what none of the Audi TT's rival offer is that iconic exterior design that triumphantly channels the original TT from 1998.
Yet the real hero of this car, in my opinion, is the minimalistic interior. It feels more like you're sitting in an abstract art gallery than a car and I love that.
How much does the 2020 Audi TT S cost?
Price: $99,900 (plus on-road costs)
Available: Now
Engine: 2.0-litre four-cylinder turbo-petrol
Output: 210kW/380Nm
Transmission: Six-speed dual-clutch automatic
Fuel: 7.0L/100km (ADR Combined)
CO2: 162g/km (ADR Combined)
Safety rating: Four-star (ANCAP 2015)
- Exterior design
- Minimalist interior design
- Low fuel consumption
- Lacks dynamic character
- Expensive for what it is
- Ageing driver assist tech
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