Front seats are heated and air conditioned, the steering wheel is heated, and a full suite of connectivity features makes the A7 fast friends with your cell phone or MP3 player.
   2013 Audi A7. Click image to enlarge |
The sleek, coupe-like roofline means rear headroom is limited for taller occupants, though it should handle four adults of standard height with no concern. The A7’s front seats are comfortable, equipped with storage drawers beneath, and flanked by deep, door-mounted storage pockets. Road-trip ready, indeed.
There’s a surprising level of utility, too. The wide, long trunk, accessed by a motorized hatchback tailgate, should offer up plenty of room for your gear. And with standard Quattro all-wheel drive, it’s a sporty bit of elegant utility you can use confidently, even in the middle of a blizzard.
The A7’s LED headlights are noteworthy. I’ve driven countless thousands of kilometres in hundreds of cars after dark, and the A7’s lighting system is one of the best I’ve ever come across. The colour, saturation and quality of its illumination is magnificent. Light floods a virtual 180-degree spread in front of the car, and sees illumination extend into the tree-line on either side of two-lane highways. After a 3.5-hour drive from Sudbury to Kirkland Lake, Ontario after dark, my eyes weren’t suffering the usual onset of fatigue typical of this trip.
A night-vision camera bolsters after-dark confidence even further. The thermally driven system can show drivers warm, large objects (humans, moose, deer, bears) even farther up the road than the high-beams. It can track pedestrians and warn drivers of a possible impact, too. Slick system – and it may have saved a fox from making friends with the A7’s front bumper on my late-night drive.
End of the day, this should prove to be a four-door, all-climate ‘coupe’ that’s ready for a day of shopping, a trip to the slopes in a blizzard, or anything in between.
With just three litres of displacement, the A7’s ‘3.0T’ V6 uses direct injection and a so-called “mechanical turbocharger” to boost power output. Us Canadians call that a ‘supercharger’, by the way.
As Audi has demonstrated for years, forced induction and direct injection work well together, the direct injection system enabling a cylinder cooling effect that combats the elevated combustion chamber temperatures that result from adding a blower. In plain English, using the two systems together allows engineers to safely run a higher, more efficient compression ratio, maximizing power and mileage.
Drivers get 310 horsepower, handled by an automatic transmission with a quick-to-react paddle-shift manual mode. Though it’s a conventional automatic, responses to shift requests are dealt with virtually immediately, complete with rev-matching in both directions. The eight-speed box helps the A7 perform strongly while enabling mileage figures that suggest otherwise.
My test average consumption landed at 10.9 L/100 km while drinking premium, with that figure falling just below 7 during late-night highway cruising when the darkness dictated a reduction in my usual cruising speed to just above the posted limit.
