On the road: Audi RS 3 Sportback – <b>car review</b> | Technology | The <b>...</b> |
| On the road: Audi RS 3 Sportback – <b>car review</b> | Technology | The <b>...</b> Posted: 04 Dec 2015 10:00 PM PST Audi RS3 Sportback: 'It's flamboyant, irresponsible, outrageously fun and somewhat shaming.' The Audi RS 3 Sportback starts to rev like a thousand wild animals before you've engaged the engine, a highly engineered fakery, like piping the synthesised smell of bread through a supermarket. It takes mettle not to be embarrassed, especially sitting in stationary traffic with a stop-start engine waking up, roaring and going back to sleep, like a narcoleptic lion. Is it worth it for the tremendous acceleration? For the fact that, if you find yourself two lanes away from your exit on the M1 with 15 seconds to go, you can scare everyone, make your front-seat passenger swallow his entire sandwich in one go, and make it, easily, with seven seconds to spare? For the fact that the four-wheel drive and magnificent horsepower sometimes make you feel as though you're in control not just of your own car, but of everybody else's, and indeed, the entire road? It's not necessary, is it, to make you sound like a petrolhead? Everyone can see you're a petrolhead – you're in a sporty Audi. There are a couple of other irritations. The wing mirrors only flip out after the engine's switched on, and they do so quite slowly. It seems quite perverse to spend God knows how many man-hours and how much money getting a James Bond-esque 0-62mph in 4.3 seconds, only to have to wait a minute and a half before you can indicate. But maybe looking in your mirror before you signal is a bit last century. The satnav is flaky for such an expensive car: none of the screen controls are very intuitive and the programme claims to know how to duck traffic, before immediately directing you down the side of Harrods. Yet the toggling between its media and yours is the best I've encountered. Related: On the road: Vauxhall Adam S – car review My friend Charlotte, the one who owns a Volvo because she likes the idea of sitting in the open back to put her wellies on, even though she owns only ornamental wellingtons and if confronted by mud would think it was a rejuvenating skin treatment, called the Audi "girly". This brought me up short as I realised that every time I see a car with such elegant cornering and unignorable power, carbonised dash, a decent bass speaker and earth-burning carbon emissions, I immediately file it under "boy racer". This is a dated sexist furrow that the car industry escaped before I did. The car is neither male nor female: it is flamboyant, irresponsible, outrageously fun and somewhat shaming, with a smooth, smooth leather steering wheel that makes you think you're Steve McQueen (which is possibly the most unisex of all imaginative excursions).
Price £51,185  |
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