Audi A8L 4.2 Quattro

Audi A8L 4.2 Quattro - The Audi A8 has been reducing the planet's ferrous consumption since the model was introduced in Europe in 1994 as the world's first all-Coke-can car to hit volume production. Asked what vehicles they personally found interesting that year, car engineers were at least as likely to answer the A8 as the Superior Crown Sovereign (it's a hearse, also featured prominently in our July 1994 issue).

Worse, the A8's styling was about as electrifying as a 1040 long form and didn't really play up the aluminum angle. It didn't play up the four-wheel-drive Quattro capabilities, either. Or the fabulous handling. Or the fact that the A8 was a car and not a Sub-Zero freezer tipped on its side. At least not to potential buyers who walked away in herds. The old A8's biggest year in the U.S. was 1999. Dealers sold 2481 cars, or 0.01 percent of '99 new-vehicle sales.

Inside, the bland dash and the puffy Care Bear steering wheel have vamoosed. A compact four-spoke rim does the course control now while the speedo and tach look out through what appear to be the exhaust stacks of a tractor-trailer. Although airy and comfortable, the whole burl-laminated cockpit seems to snuggle in closer with lower seats and a higher center console that ramps upward to meet the dash. The back seat, meanwhile, has enough legroom for a passenger shaped like Shaq, although it lacks the rear-seat adjustments found on some Mercedes S-class and BMW 7-series models.

The centerpiece of this ergonomic opus is the knurled knob that controls the dashboard's hidden seven-inch LCD screen. At the tap of a button it pops out like a jack-in-the-box to serve up navigation, radio, and car-system information like BMW's iDrive superknob.

A roving thumb and forefinger quickly memorize the layout of the Audi's buttons. Better still, many of the most important functions still have their own buttons, including the radio seek (thumb wheels on the steering-wheel spokes allow you to change volume and roam among the presets), the electronic stability control, and the climate control. The latter retains a dedicated panel on the console that looks and behaves like a conventional automatic climate system.

There are annoyances. Every time the car or the MMI system is switched on, a polemic from Audi's lawyers must be answered by entering "I Accept." We don't accept such dunce-oriented design, common though it may be across the industry. Also, the multicolor screen doesn't always return to the right window after startup. If you are following your route on a navigation map and stop for gas, the LCD returns not to the map but to the route-programming screen, as though it can't remember what it was doing.

Gamely, we moved on to the air-spring suspension control in the MMI but found it didn't provide much relief from the A8's fairly brittle ride. Press the button marked "car" on the console, and the LCD lights up with an image of the A8 and the four air-suspension modes: lift, comfort, automatic, and dynamic. Lift raises the car about one inch above the 4.7-inch static ground clearance; dynamic mode drops it an inch. Problem was, the computer kept switching itself back to the automatic mode, a glitch according to Audi.

Nor does the A8 feel terrifically quick even with the rumbling 330-hp V-8 clearing its throat and singing the high notes. Displacing 4.2 liters, the Audi engine is smaller than the BMW 745i's 325-hp, 4.4-liter V-8 and the Mercedes S500 4MATIC's 302-hp, 5.0-liter V-8, but it's more potent on paper. On the track, the A8 is sucking high-octane exhaust from both the Benz and BMW at the 60-mph mark, by 0.4 and 0.3 second, respectively.