Category: Large Executive 
Price Range: £49,975 to £80,260
Refined engines, very good automatic gearbox, quality interior.
Some tyre hum, a little conservative on the inside.
Doesn't come across as all that sporting, but it is competent and accomplished.
As the sporting competitor in the luxury segment, you could forgive the A8 if it didn't quite cosset you as snugly as a 7-Series or an S-Class. And, in truth, it probably doesn't, but it is still an extremely comfortable car.
The seats are large - but not so big that you feel lost in them - and they're supportive on long journeys. The steering wheel is a nice chunky shape and a reasonable size. On the move, noise is quite well suppressed, but there's the occasional hum of wide tyres, particularly on some of the larger optional alloys, and the ride quality does suffer a little on poorer roads. There was some excess wind noise from the A-pillar, but this seems to have been a glitch on pre-production examples we drove. That said, any tyre or wind noise is probably only audible because the engines are so quiet.
The boot is pretty cavernous. In the back seats, you get loads of legroom and acres of headroom. For two adults, it's very roomy, but because the seats are designed for two, a third back seat passenger would feel a bit of an unwanted accessory. One grumble: the centre console is extremely wide, which makes you feel a bit distanced from your front seat associate.
With a CD autochanger in the glovebox and a Bose sound-system, listening to the A8's stereo is one of the pleasures of driving. It's a very good system, albeit a little tricky to operate at times because of the MMI menu-led controls.
The sat-nav is pretty easy and intuitive to use, though not as easy as Lexus's touch-screen jobbie, and as a passenger, the speed with which the map's zoom can be changed gives hours of fun. One minute you're looking at the entirety of Europe, from London to Berlin and Lisbon, the next second you're zoomed to 500 metres above an arrow spearing along an A-road. Okay, the novelty will probably wear off...
Latest Readers' Drives About the Audi A8
wrote on 05 05 2007