Don’t believe the hype
Forget the marketing hokum: when it comes to performance, Audi’s exceptional new Q3 can speak for itself
The word ‘ executive’ does bad things to me. I feel, rising in my throat, the reaction that my late mother-in-law used to call ‘the dry boak’. Applied to items for sale, such as houses, ‘executive’ usually means that some shark is trying to gouge more money out of customers by tickling their vanities. The most fanciful use of the term I ever saw was in a pub in the south-east of England that offered an ‘executive ploughman’s lunch’.
So when Audi speaks of its new Q3 as a ‘fivedoor compact executive crossover’, my hackles immediately rise – and that reaction is only aggravated by the addition of that profoundly suspect word ‘crossover’, which always makes me wonder who’s kidding whom.
Those mistrusts rapidly evaporate, however, on contact with the car. At £39,355, it may be throat - clutch ingly expensive, but the new Q3 2.0 TDI Quattro S line that I borrowed is – despite the marketing hokum – a marvellous piece of work.
Based on the A3 hatchback and taking its foundations from the VW Golf, the Q3 is like a miniaturised version of the Q7 (which rivals the Range Rover) and the Q5 (which is more like the Land Rover Discovery). The Q3, then, is in the same class of more luxurious (for which, read ‘pricier’) SUVs as Range Rover’s Evoque, Mercedes-Benz’s GLA and BMW’s X1; and it acquits itself mightily well in that company.
For this year’s revision of the Q3, Audi has changed the nose and sport ified the body, with body-coloured sills and wheel arches. When you operate the lever for the indicators, instead of a single winking bulb, little LED lights scroll in lines of glittering dots, like the waita-moment spots that run along the pages of a search engine while it’s trying to find the place.
The interior of an Audi – almost any Audi – sets the standard to which other manufacturers can only aspire. My Q3 S line was up there with the best. Special sports seats at the front with the S line logo were complemented by lashings of leather, soft-touch dashboard, perfect analogue instrument panel, easy-to-operate controls for satellite navigation, audio and Bluetooth, and a 6.5in central screen, with a matching display on the mini-screen in front of the steering wheel. Everything here has been refined and calculated over decades by a succession of the best designers in the world.
Those sports seats give you a view of the road bettered only by a giraffe, the height of the Q3’s body being accentuated by 19in alloy wheels. Despite that elevation, however, the Q3 motors on open roads with the self-possession and poise of a higher-performance saloon, largely as a benefit of its short wheelbase. Altering the suspension settings from the controls in the cabin changes the ride from the comforts of a chauffeured limo to the harder responses of a sports car. Audi’s all-wheel-drive Quattro transmission system adds grip in corners but mutes the feel of the electronic steering system so the driver doesn’t get so much feedback as perhaps they would like. That Quattro system does also provide some measure of off-road capability, but a rutted track on a dry day or a light snowfall on an unmade drive would probably be its limit.
Engines range from 1.4-litre TFSI petrol with 150bhp, to the 2.0-litre TDI with 184 bhp that I borrowed. That amounts to a proper handful of grunt, reflected in the Q3’s performance figures. Acceleration from 0-60mph in 7.5 seconds and top speed of 136mph allow a speed of progress and overtaking powers on country roads that ought to be enough for anybody.
Audi’s figure of 50.4mpg for overall fuel consumption seems, however, to be purely fanciful. My own average was 33.7mpg.
An extra £20,000 would buy a Porsche Macan, but I doubt if many enthusiastic drivers would find much more to enjoy in the Porsche than the Q3.
‘Altering the suspension settings changes the ride from chauffeured limo to sports car’