Category: Hot Hatchbacks 
Price Range: £15,265 to £26,525
Beautifully made, compact, exceptionally quick, superb all-weather abilities, useful six-speed gearbox, retains its value well.
A little cramped, slightly notchy gearshift, engine note, handling and ride below par, expensive, a likely target for professional thieves.
A very desirable, high quality car that combines near-supercar performance with hatchback versatility. Not an emotionally-engaging driving machine, though.
Audi has a tradition of building a very high performance version of each of its main model types and this has been carried through with the S3, which is a four wheel-drive, turbocharged variant of the A3 hatchback.
Although dubbed quattro, the S3 uses a different (some might say cleverer) 4x4 system: the Haldex clutch, known in VW models as 4Motion. As a result, purists might say that this is not a 'real' Audi.
The company's engineers have managed to coax 225bhp from just 1.8-litres (it had 210bhp up to December 2001) but that hasn't resulted in a stroppy, difficult-to-drive car. Like the S-series cars before it, the S3 is exceptionally rapid but it lacks finesse.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Audi A3
wrote on 18 05 2007
wrote on 07 10 2006
wrote on 09 06 2006