But it's also the little things, like the font of the little white numbers on the gauges, which happens to be one of my favorites
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| At night, all the little numbers on the LED screens and letters glow red on a black background, as do all the symbols for the climate control and stereo system. (Photo: Justin Couture, American Auto Press) |
(I'm a graphic designer, so excuse the obsession with geeky design details). At night, all the little numbers on the LED screens and letters glow red on a black background, as do all the symbols for the climate control and stereo system (an optional Bose system is available for you brand snobs, but the standard 10-speaker system is good, very good) arranged in a logical linear fashion on the center stack, making for a fabulous peripheral lightshow as I sped down the highway with the city lights streaking by.
And, boy, do those city lights streak by. The A4 Avant that I was driving was motivated by Audi's new 2.0T turbocharged powerplant with FSI (Fuel Straight Injection), which means the
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| The A4 Avant that I was driving was motivated by Audi's new 2.0T turbocharged powerplant with FSI. (Photo: Justin Couture, American Auto Press) |
spray of gasoline goes directly into the cylinder. It's an engine I drove to great effect in VW's latest Jetta. In the A4, the 2.0T makes the same 200-horsepower and 207 lb-ft of torque, but with Audi's vastly superior wheel and tire package and sportier suspension calibration, the difference was almost everything I could have asked for from the automotive gods.
Surprisingly there was no DSG, just Audi's 6-speed automatic with Tiptronic manual shifting available. It's responsive to a degree, but I generally wasn't in the mood for any "do it yourself" shifting, so I kept it in the Sport setting most often, which delays upshifts to keep the revs higher in the range and works with braking by downshifting as you're rolling to a stop at an intersection. Unless you give me paddle shifters, I'm usually content to exert whatever control I can through my right foot alone.
