Audi A6 Allroad | Trendy Luxury Wagon

We review the 2021 Audi Allroad Wagon to see learn all about the Luxury Wagon formula. While the SUV and CUV are hot, like a maxed-out barnyard, wagons are largely ignored in the US. We look at the good, bad, and all the technical things that make this Audi more than just four doors and a hatch. Other products include Mercedes GLA and GLB, Volvo V60, and V90, maybe BMW X2.

The audi a6 all road this is a wagon it’s a wagon built on the a6 sedan so you get everything that you’re used to with the sedan version but more practicality and usability they’ve added a bunch of technical things underneath which is a majority of what you’re paying for here but we’ll talk about that in the shop in terms of technology this is littered with it this

Car is tested around 72 thousand dollars it has the prestige package so you have the great things like the adjustable ambient lighting and at night this really sets the mood and makes it feel more of a special place and if you don’t like it you don’t like all the the ambience around you you can disable it this comes with audi’s mmi cockpit which is the enormous

Display screen for your center gauge cluster and it is configurable in multiple ways you have different gauge cluster styles and the ability to set a massive google maps display in front of you and we’ve seen this for a while with audi but everything in terms of technology implementation is excellent here whether you agree with how they do it whether you agree

With all the talking cars it is fast the screen quality the center screen for the main infotainment including the hvac control screen the black levels are superb they don’t blind you at night and you can dim them down quite a bit now my problem with it is all of your pretty much all of your physical controls are gone here so your heating and air conditioning

Now has to be on a screen and some of these static controls that we’re used to with knobs but buttons and switches that you don’t particularly interact with that often now they’re always here on an always on screen that you can never disable it’s just it’s one of those things that takes a lot of time to get used to for me and i think while it looks clean it’s

Kind of just there for the sake of being there because it’s cool and that’s what people value these days your main infotainment screen is embedded in the dash it’s not sticking out it looks well integrated and you can turn that off with one button on the lower screen now everything else this feels very comfortable this does not have the upgraded seats with the

Luxury package and i feel like that’s something you’re going to want to get these seats feel like something that’s out of like a forty thousand dollar car not a seventy thousand dollar car it doesn’t have the massage function although the heating and cooling works well it just it feels very flat on the bottom cushion and then you have no thigh cushion support

So if you’re taller that might be an issue for you now everything else in terms of ergonomics the shifter the wood grain that you can choose and some of the leathers and textures in here are great they feel very well built everything has this solidness to it and it’s something that you feel at peace when you’re driving there is a great sense that you’re going

To drive this and feel very calm it’s a quiet space the leg room is good the seat adjustability is good the back seat room is good and of course when you look at the hatch space it is so deep and i thought when i looked at i’m like man you could fit like a half sized coffin in there it is enormous but you know unlike an suv you lose some of the height because the

Roof lines a little bit lower now the audio system the base bang and olufsen setup here is really good it’s surprisingly good for just kind of what you get out of the box if you’re not somebody that is obsessed with audio you’re not going to have a huge penalty to doing that but as we know and i haven’t tested it but i’ve heard it the upgraded bang olufsen audio

Is great for audio files it’s one of the best systems out there and it’s something you’re gonna have to think about spending because you’re pushing four to five thousand dollars for that but i think that’s a good time to head into the shop and talk about all the technical attributes of why you’re paying all this money underneath the audi a6 all road quattro i

Talked about the price on the interior and you want to know that that money is going a long way so here it is this is where a majority of audi’s engineering dollars go the chassis so let’s talk about that the all road comes with standard air suspension so you have an adaptive damper that controls the compression and the rebound and then you have an air spring

That’s tied into that damper assembly in the front now people ask all the time how does air suspension work and i’m not going to go into a deep dive of that in this video but essentially you have an air spring with an air line that runs to a junction box on each corner of the car and there is a compressor that can fill up the air bladders and there is a bleeder

Valve that can reduce the amount of air in each spring now this helps with self leveling so if you’re on an off camber or a strange amount of pavement or off-road it can raise and lower each corner of the car the benefits are if you’re off-road this car can raise up to its maximum off-road height below 17 miles an hour you get the most ground clearance to about

35 miles an hour it reduces the the ground clearance a little bit but it gives you that functional stuff for off-road and then when you’re at high speed namely over like 75 miles an hour it can lower it to its maximum to give you more stability and this is where air ride has been around for a long time however it isn’t until recently with the advent of micro

Processor controllers new body control modules that can sync up everything to a level that is almost instantaneous that they can now control all these systems together and all of that technology is expensive aluminum all lower control arms upright knuckle aluminum subframe and of course this costs more money to develop an engineer the whole point of having a

Multi-link front which this is what this has is to reduce more of the vibrations and the oscillations you get from the road so the whole concept of the electronic controlled chassis as audi calls it is to be able to do everything they want to try to get everything done under one architecture so they don’t have to change all of this for every single car from a

Sporty suv to a sporty car to more of a cruiser like this it can give you that multiple personality from lowering it to stiffening it to making it more quick to respond but i think there’s more to talk about in the back half let’s take a look at that in the back what you’re going to see is a lot of the same in the front although in the back they separate the air

Springs from the dampers which are combined in the front so these are your huge air springs and the dampers are pretty much straight up and down here everything else in the suspension is aluminum like the front now the big thing that you’re going to notice back here is this zf module this is a rear wheel steering module and what it does is it connects to two tow

Arms here that can push the rear wheels in or out so below about 35 miles an hour the wheels will turn up to 5 degrees in the opposite direction of the front wheels which means in tight parking scenarios it shrinks down the footprint of this car and this is one of the reasons why audi and a lot of manufacturers now are buying into all of this electronic control

And all these different and higher-end devices because cars and suvs at least in america continue to get larger and larger and these are one of the tricks that they’re using to try to shrink down the size or the feel of them to make them more nimble like their smaller car counterparts of course you’re adding a ton of cost complication and engineering design to

That so i’m going to show you a quick diagram that audi supplies from their ecp which is their control unit or one of their their control modules for all of this basically it’s taking in account all of this sensor data from everything to do with the car because again everything’s electronic from steering angle to throttle input to cameras that read ahead now it

Can read ahead the type of road conditions in front of you whether the elevation is going to change or if there’s a pothole so it can adjust all the suspension including the rear steerer module from there it takes all the input the processor takes a look at it and then it changes all the actuators but it has to do this in real time this is where these cars have

Changed from where they were at 15 years ago like i said in the front but the rear steer module does make a huge difference in terms of just getting around in tight spots and then at higher speeds it deactivates that and they turn in the same direction up to two degrees to help get the car to turn in to make it again make it feel more nimble this is the mindset

Of this company they are trying to make every car have this certain dynamic or certain character and you’re gonna see more and more car companies talk about this how they’re unifying they want their own special touch on how their car behaves and a lot of this has become much easier with the advent of software and all of that design so this is a majority of what

You’re paying for back here or the entire car but let’s see what this translates to when you put this out on the road setting off in the audi a6 all road i want you to take a look at the ride height change real quick before we get started between dynamic mode which is its lowest setting and off-road which is the highest setting there is a massive amount of

Difference that you get because of the air suspension something you can’t do with traditional coil springs so that’s where this car has much more versatility if you’re whether you’re driving it off-road if you want to take some trails or on-road and it does both extremely well and that’s what makes this so attractive but let’s get this thing off the line i’m

In dynamic mode and you’re going to get to see kind of just how this thing drives so we have a v6 here it is a turbocharged v6 and it is incredibly quiet and smooth it has this level of refinement low vibration and it’s connected to a seven speed dual clutch it makes about 335 horsepower and when you really get this thing going it is exactly what you want from

This you barely notice it and it has just enough resonance and just enough slight vibration that it’s pleasing it’s almost more musical and you hear just a little bit of that turbo so everything else is extremely muted everything else is more subdued this is on the softer side the softer side of everything and that’s what makes it so comfortable and so enjoyable

To drive now in terms of the different drive modes which you’ll probably never touch on this car they don’t make a massive noticeable difference to you as the driver it always feels just more soft so i’m in dynamic i’m just going to peg this off the line so you get to get a sense of the acceleration uh those huge monoblock front calipers i talked about in

The shop it’s hilarious because those things are they stop you so hard it stops you like a sports car and again this is part of driving a car like this that they do certain things not because it’s sporty if this is not trying to be sporty at all they’re doing certain things because of the safety and confidence level you get driving it and while some of it is

Definitely for safety it makes it much more enjoyable to drive if you do like driving it doesn’t turn this thing into a total couch the other thing is the suspension and the differential so when you come out of a corner i thought this thing would just wash out but the rear end will actually move around in dynamic mode so it’s able to send more torque to the back

To give you a more funnish driving experience but when you’re done with that really this is almost how i’ve exclusively driven this car you switch the drive modes back to comfort and it turns into a serene plush soft ride with plenty of ground clearance so if you’re in the drive-through and you want to nail some curbing you can do that you don’t have to worry

And what this does is it it allows you to relax more you can enjoy some of the amenities in here like if you have the upgraded audio system or even the bass you can listen to music in serenity you can take your phone calls and not be bludgeoned with road noise i’ve really enjoyed driving this car if you are looking for something more sporty if you’re looking for

Something a bit more engaging to drive that’s not the all-road it is definitely i would say on the 75 percentile of comfort and quietness but let’s head into the final thoughts and talk about kind of the pros and cons final thoughts on the a6 all road now the big thing is wagons are not popular in the united states we can argue how why but people are obsessed

With cuvs and suvs that may not even be as capable or as developed or good as this but that’s just how it is the wagon format offers a lot here it’s one of the biggest selling features of this over a sedan it has the performance of the sedan it has the suspension design the air ride is very good it gives you the higher ride height it gives you capability going

On and off road and you have the performance of like a car the v6 the transmission the dual clutch is great and it’s super refined at the same time this is more of that luxury appliance with the ability to haul jack used it to move his corvette c7 tires which are enormous to go torture discounts higher with and you know i thought about this overall this is an

Amazing appliance that you would look forward to driving every single day for mundane tasks because it is an isolation chamber and while that’s one of the things i absolutely hated about it was also one of the things that i loved about it and the people that are looking to to buy a luxury wagon are going to enjoy this it’s got a way better drive train than the

Volvo equivalents and you could argue some of the interior design there but really everything as a complete package is at such a high level so what’s the negatives i wish this wasn’t so much money the one we’re testing is over 70 grand if you want to add the premium audio and the better seats and like painting the unpainted plastic on the side you’re pushing

Like 85 000 and it’s just crazy to me i don’t know if a lot of the the customers are gonna buy this are gonna appreciate all the things i talked about in the shop i wonder if stripping off air ride stripping off rear wheel steering stripping off some of the gimmicks on the interior with the dual screens and all of that wouldn’t be best served to have a kind of

A lower price point getting in here at like 45.50 because a lot of the time when i’m driving this that’s what i feel like some of it’s worth but again i don’t know really who’s going to be buying this but if you love that and you have that money buy it it’s it’s an amazing wagon i’ll leave it at that thanks for watching i’ll see you next time you

Transcribed from video
Audi A6 Allroad | Trendy Luxury Wagon By savagegeese