Great balance of features: Safety, comfort, reliability, power, and handling.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Competitive price, exterior and interior design and build quality, amazing safety features, fun to drive.

Cons: A semi-luxury sedan with a small back seat, poor cupholder placement(passenger), no automatic headlights.

The Bottom Line: 
I recommend this car for anyone seeking a well-designed automobile with an excellent feature set at a reasonable price. The safety features and all wheel drive are exceptional.

Author's Review
I have owned this car since last summer, and so far I give it very high marks. I have divided this review into sections.

1. Description
The model I purchased (used) is a 2001 Audi A4 1.8 Turbo with Quattro (Audi's tried and true all wheel drive) and a 5-speed manual. It has the cold weather package (heated seats and mirrors, fog lights) and the sport package (sport-tuned suspension, and 16" ten-spoke rims in place of the eight-spoke standard rims).

2. Performance/Handling
The first thing that grabbed my attention when test-driving the car, and continues to make the drive pleasurable, is how the manual transmission seems to pull my hand from one gear into the next. It makes shifting a smooth breeze, even in stop and go traffic. The all wheel drive keeps me more in control on icy or slick roads while other front and rear wheel drive sedans slide around turns or peel out at green lights. I have owned both front and rear wheel sedans and driven other all wheel drive vehicles and Audi's Quattro is solid. For a four-cylinder this car performs very well, especially when passing on the highway or freeway. The turbo helps considerably but takes a bit of getting used to. The suspension is excellent. You get a fairly smooth ride, but still feel very connected to the road without any floating.

3. Comfort
The seats offer great support, even on corners, and visibility is good. The heated seats are a nice touch in our cold and sometimes sub-zero winters. One touch windows make drive-throughs and sunny days more enjoyable, and less hassle. The Bose 8 speaker sound system is clear, accurate, and distortion-free, even at uncomfortable volumes. I like the fact that there is no visible antenna sticking out into the air by a windshield like other automobiles - nice touch! 60/40 rear fold down seats make storing long objects in the trunk a simpler chore, and the trunk hinge design is set up so that no metal bars smash your cargo when you shut the trunk, unlike on most models I've seen.

4. Safety
Perhaps the most important to families are the great safety features. Front and side airbags are designed to offer additional protection from impacts from the front or side. Front and rear head supports are solid and well designed to help protect in a rear collision. This is my first car with auto dimming mirrors, and it's nice not to have to block head lights from behind or flip up a rear view mirror when a car approaches from behind at night. The car comes with a real spare, not a donut, and the rear armrest is equipped with a first aid kit.

5. Conclusion
This is a car that will please someone who wants a little bit of everything, but does not want to pay 50k for it. The price of this car is excellent for what you get. So far I've had to replace a $10 headlight, in addition to regular maintenance. At 95,000 miles this car still runs like new, and I'm a high mileage driver, so I've put a lot of miles on it in a short time. Even in cold weather this car fires right up, warms up quickly, and has so far been very reliable. It receives high marks from me.

****Update****
Still going strong at over 108,000 miles. By the way, after running Chevron's 3000 mile fuel system treatment on my engine, I'm now averaging 30mpg.