AWD from the leader in AWD

Author's Rating:

Pros: Quick Pick-up, Excellent handling, great gas mileage, FUN to drive luxury sedan!

Cons: Small back seat for car seats

The Bottom Line: 
I recommend the A4 over the Saab 9-3 (I own a 9-5), the Volvo S40 and the BMW 318/325. It has the best overall quality, fuel economy, performance and price.

Author's Review
The Audi A4 is a 4 door compact sedan that is typically equipped with Audi's signature 'Quattro' AWD system.

Audi has been the pioneer in AWD cars since the 80's and it shows. This car handles like a dream in all weather conditions.

We bought the A4 on a lease return from a local auto broker. If you have never used an auto broker, I'd HIGHLY recommend doing so for your next purchase no matter what you are looking for. They will typically charge a flat fee (usually $300-500) to get you a car at auction or even from another dealer's lot! We saved roughly $3000 on our A4 by buying from a broker.

The easiest way to find one is do an internet search on cars.com or the like for the type of car you are looking for and then get the 'dealer info' from there, it will typically state if they are brokers.

On to the A4....

This car was a lease return. These cars are inspected by the dealer when they are returned from the original lessee and then sent either to auction or to a dealer who may wholesale them out.


The interior:
The leather interior is supple. The heated seats are a must if you live anywhere that temps drop below 32F.
Available Bose stereo sounds incredible. The tiptronic automatic transmission allows you to drive the car as thought it were a manual (with out clutch) for increased performance, or as an auto for normal driving. The controls are very well placed and logical in their operation.


Driving:
With the peppy 1.8 turbo-charged engine, it MOVED! The Quattro AWD system keeps the car on the road in all conditions. The most amazing display was during the Christmas blizzard in Colorado last year. The A4 was able to make it around on slick snowy and icy roads where others were getting stuck (even 4x4s).
The car is very maneuverable due to its short wheel base but it's still a great car to drive on a long distance trip.

Xenon headlights provide excellent visibility and the fog lights give great visibility in the worst conditions.

The Cons:
The only bad part of owning the A4 was that it was a little small for 4 adults. It also is VERY small if you have to put a rear-facing car seat in it. The car did not need any service while we owned it. We had it from 50k miles up to nearly 70k with out a visit to the shop except for new tires.


A couple notes:
If you are looking into an A4, ensure that the scheduled service has been done. You can easily tell this by turning on the car and reading the display between the tach and speedometer. If it says "Service!" then the latest service has not been done and you can use that as bargaining power.

Also, make sure that the timing belt has been changed if the car is within 20k of 90,000 total miles. This is normally called for by Audi at 90k but most Audi mechanics say to get it done at around 60-70k.


We had the Audi A4 Quattro 1.8T for nearly 2 years. We were forced to trade-in for an A6 because of our new addition to the family.

I would buy another in a minute if I didn't need the space; the car was a dream to own.