When estate agents take photographs of a house they’re selling, they almost
always get the vendor to move his car out of shot.
Thumb through the advertisements at the front of Country Life and it’s as
though you’ve moved back 200 years. The houses have wisteria and sunshine
but the drives are empty, and that’s a pity because the car parked outside
tells us so much more than the truncated estate agents’ descriptions.
You’d go to see a house described as having 6 bdrms, gch, gge, 999-yr lse, 2
pdcks and a lk. But you wouldn’t bother if there was a BMW X5 with 20in
wheels parked outside. Because then you’d know it had baggy-knicker
curtains, lots of chintz, several football-trophy cabinets and that all the
taps would be in the shape of swans.
Two weeks ago the Home section of this newspaper ran a picture of Jim
Davidson’s agreeable house in Surrey. You could tell it was Jim Davidson’s
house because parked right outside the front door was a royal blue Bentley
Arnage.
In some ways, having a Bentley Arnage in the picture is a good thing. It shows
the vendor is not worried about looking after the pennies. Which means the
lead on the roof will have been applied with a ladle, and that the sash
windows won’t rattle.
The colour, though — that was the giveaway at Jim’s gaff. Green or fawn would
have been fine, but blue suggests the owner has little sense of tradition,
which in turn means lots of zebra-skin rugs, mingling with endless maroon
drapes. Sure enough, close inspection of the interior shots revealed this to
be the case.
I would never buy a house from someone with a 1998 Renault Mégane either.
Anyone who drives such a thing has no imagination, which means the walls of
his house will be magnolia and there will be an avocado bathroom suite. The
garden will need work, too, unless you like lots of flowerbeds filled with
municipal pansies.
Nor would I drive very far to see a house with a Porsche Boxster parked
outside. A Boxster suggests a single man, which means the house will be
completely empty except for a huge plasma-screen television and an even more
enormous fridge. The only chair will be a black La-Z-Boy with buttons in the
armrest. And there will be many “self-improvement” and “management made
easy” books by the futon.
I would, however, be interested if the vendor had an Audi, especially if it
were an A8. A car like this means the owner has deliberately not bought a
BMW, which suggests he does not play golf, which in turn means he does have
some taste. It also means he is an architect or a designer of some kind, so
he knows what he’s doing with the flooring and so on.
Audi is trying very hard at the moment to change all this. The company ensures
that a fleet of 50 A8s is on hand to move celebrities around London whenever
there’s a big premiere or a party, and as a result its public relations man
is in Hello! and OK! more often than the Duchess of York.
Happily, however, the ruse doesn’t seem to be working. Jordan may be ferried
to the opening of Armani and Gabbani’s new shop in the back of an A8, but as
soon as she’s inside she’ll make a beeline for someone with an X5. The
gormless oaf she’s hanging around with at the moment — the one from the
jungle, who has a waxed chest — you just know that he’s a Beemer kind of
guy.
Audi, then, is still more Victorian England than Victoria Beckham. I can see
David Dimbleby in an Audi, whereas, even if I stand on my head, I cannot see
Jim Davidson in one. Annoyingly, however, the A8 has never been a very good
car.
For proof that Audis are average cars, driven and made by jolly nice people,
you need look no further than the press blurb for the new long-wheelbase 6
litre W12 A8.
Helpfully, the Audi PR department has produced a series of charts comparing
its new car with rival offerings from Mercedes and BMW. From these we can
establish very quickly that the new A8 is beaten soundly by the Merc S600
when it comes to power and speed, and handsomely by the BMW on the fuel
economy front.
Much is made of Audi’s decision to make its A8 from lightweight aluminium, but
in the interests of fairness and balance a whole page is taken up with a bar
chart showing that in the all-important area of power-to-weight the new car
loses once again to the Mercedes.
Money? Well, at £75,775 the Audi is £4,000 less than the BMW and undercuts the
Merc by a whopping £16,000. But don’t worry, Audi points out that a fully
loaded version of its car would cost £115,000. So the message from Audi
itself is that the new A8 is more expensive, less powerful, not as fast, and
quite a bit more thirsty than its main rivals.
I have a little more to add, if I may. The car’s enormous new grille is
hideous. I’ve heard of cars being modelled on cheetahs and sharks and birds
of prey, but this must be the first to be modelled on a guppy.
I suppose it needs to be so vast to feed the monster that hides behind it. In
essence this is the same W12 engine that you’ll find in the Bentley
Continental GT, but in the Audi there was a certain coarseness to the power
delivery, as though the fuel had sand in it, and it just didn’t deliver the
oomph I was expecting.
Sure, the Bentley has turbos where the Audi does not. But then neither does
the VW Phaeton, and that goes like jet-propelled double cream. The figures
say the A8 does 0 to 60mph in 5.2sec, but it certainly doesn’t feel that
way.
Of course, this being a long-wheelbase limousine, a lack of acceleration is
not the end of the world. It would be hard to sit in the back designing a
new skyscraper if the chauffeur had a nuclear reactor under his right foot —
you’d end up with a squiggle on the plans and the damn thing would fall
down.
Similarly, I’m not going to twitter on about the lifeless steering. In a
normal A8 it’s a nuisance, but in a car like this . . . who cares? What I
will complain about is the ride. I’m reliably informed that, contrary to all
the evidence, air suspension can be tuned to iron out bumps at low speeds.
So why in God’s name hasn’t Audi done this with its flagship car? Would it
have affected the handling? Who gives a damn? It’s a limo, not a limbo
dancer.
So I’m afraid that Audi’s first foray into the super-luxury segment of the
market is not really much of a success. A car like this with gigantic rear
quarters (it really is vast back there) should absolutely isolate you from
all sense of being in a car. And with that slightly coarse engine and the
jiggly low-speed ride, it doesn’t.
It’s not the end of the world, though. If you want a car to reflect your
exquisite taste, you can have the A8 with the twin-turbo V8 diesel engine —
that’s very good indeed — or if you don’t want to make tractor noises of a
morning, you can have Volkswagen’s W12 Phaeton instead.
Of course, you might not want to park a big Volkswagen outside your house. But
don’t worry. You can always park it outside mine.
VITAL STATISTICS
Model: Audi A8 6.0 quattro LWB
Engine: type W12, 5998cc
Power: 450bhp @ 6200rpm
Torque: 427 lb ft @ 4000-4700rpm
Transmission: Six-speed tiptronic, four-wheel drive
Suspension: (front) air springs, wishbone, anti-roll bar (rear)
air springs, trapezoidal-link axle
Tyres: 255/45 R18
Fuel: 20.5mpg (combined)
CO2: 336g/km
Acceleration: 0-62mph: 5.2sec
Top speed: 155mph (limited)
Price: £75,775
Verdict: Shows exquisite taste on the driveway, but little else on the
road
