Buckle up, because you're about to experience the Audi S6, one of the fastest sedans in the world. Besides its muscular performance, it's bristling with the latest car tech, so advanced that it gives you a hint of what's to come in the future of self-driving cars.
Audi lent us this car for a week, giving us a close-up look at the most advanced technology available in cars, circa mid-2013. The option-packed Audi S6 we tested ($87,720) is not the most expensive car from this upscale German automaker, but it's high enough on Audi's hierarchy to show off the tremendous power and astonishing technology of today's best cars.
At first glance, this ominous black chariot looks like a low-slung, curvy version of your dad's sedan. Don't be fooled.
At first glance, this ominous black chariot looks like a low-slung, curvy version of your dad's sedan. Don't be fooled. A closer look reveals clues about its true nature. Look how it sits on its haunches ready to pounce, with that Angry-Bird look on its face. Check out the wide track of its fat, low-profile tires, and that little badge on the side that says "V8T." Yes, those are hints that this is most certainly a hungry wolf in an ornery black sheep's clothing.
If you're a gearhead who likes to take a peek under the hood, you'll be delighted at the twin-turbocharged 4.0 L V-8 engine you'll see underneath. Soon, you'll be experiencing all 420 horses of this beast, cranking out a maximum torque of 406 pound-feet, specs that are in the vicinity of the world's most powerful cars.
After a quick walkaround, I was ready to take a seat and see what this baby could do. As I sat down in the Audi S6, I knew I was in for a treat. Just possessing the electronic fob makes the car recognize you, unlocking the door for you. When you sit down and start the engine with a quick button push, the S6 springs to life. Take a look at this six-second video and you'll see the speedometer dials jumping to attention in their test sequence, the steering wheel tilting to just the right angle, the 7-inch infotainment screen whirring into position, and even the Bang & Olufsen tweeters emerging from either side of the dash like tiny prairie dogs:
As we went for our first ride, my two traveling companions were able to logon to
Audi Connect, an in-car Wi-Fi hotspot that's hooked up to the T-Mobile 3G network, letting two of us — one on a laptop and another with an iPhone — access the web via Wi-Fi. The only drawback was that the T-Mobile network in our area is pokey, giving us a disappointing upload and download speed of less than 2Mb per second. That's slower than almost any home broadband connectivity.
The S6 also allowed me to plug in my iPhone, giving me control of all of my tunes on board, as well as letting me play Pandora radio. This also allowed the S6 to use my iPhone's LTE network, which is 10 times faster. However, this is not a new feature at all — we have the same iPhone plug-in capability in our 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid.
If you're looking to use apps in the S6, you'll be disappointed.
If you're looking to use apps in the S6, you'll be disappointed. There's no such compatibility here — even the cheapest car we tested, the
Chevy Spark, had better app compatibility than this. But perhaps the target audience for this luxo-sport monster doesn't care much about apps. It felt to me like in this context, the S6's smartphone friendliness (along with its other technical niceties) was just enough, offering easy Bluetooth connectivity that lets you upload your phonebook and place hands-free calls using speech recognition.
Another excellent use of speech recognition was the easy access to online points of interest, where you can search Google for restaurants, gas stations and other locations, either nearby or on your programmed route. This felt like science fiction to me, giving me live data from the Internet to assist me in finding anything I wanted in the physical world. Best of all, it was relatively easy to use compared with all of the other touchscreen-based infotainment systems I've tested.
That's not to say the Audi S6's infotainment system is perfect. Discerning someone's conversational meaning is difficult even for humans in a noisy environment, so it's not surprising that speech recognition inside a car barreling down the highway at 70+ MPH might not be completely accurate. But in most cases, inside the S6's exceptionally quiet cabin (even when traveling way beyond any U.S. speed limit), its recognition was just good enough to get the job done.
If you want to manually enter data, you don't use a touchscreen — Audi has a clever idea: a touchpad situated a lot closer to where your right hand normally rests. You can enter addresses using its accurate handwriting recognition capability. As you enter each number or character, you get voice feedback confirming what you just entered. This is an excellent way to enter an address on a GPS system, not requiring you to take your eyes off the road at all. And then there's the Google Earth maps, overlaying the usual street maps, giving you a realistic look at the world you're navigating. Neat.
Besides those nifty photorealistic maps, Audi's Internet-connected navigation system, launched in 2011, works like most do, with the added benefit of displaying turn-by-turn directions in the excellent heads-up display that appears to hover right over the hood. But its most delightful aspect is the way a picture from Google Street View shows up on the navigation screen as you get close to your destination. It's a terrific idea, showing you precisely what your destination looks like — making it much easier to spot.
The Audi S6 technology is easing its way toward the self-driving car. It's equipped with enough cameras to thrill an old TV director like me — there are at least a half-dozen of them mounted in strategic places around the car. That makes it so the car is almost sentient, acting like it's acutely aware of its surroundings. When you're backing up, you see a conventional backup camera view, and also on the screen you see an overhead view of your car. It's magical. Somehow the S6 combines the images from all those cameras, and computes it into a "God" view. If that's not enough, if you're about to run into something, you hear warning sounds within the car, coming from the direction of the danger.
Those cameras, accompanied by ultrasonic and radar systems, give you other potentially life-saving benefits, such as a lane-change assistant that makes lights flash on either side-view mirror to let you know if you're about to merge into a car hiding in your blind spot. There's also Active Lane Assist that steers you back into your lane if you should stray, while giving you haptic feedback with a slight buzz in the steering wheel. But it's smart enough to not engage if you're traveling slower than 40 miles per hour, or if your turn signal is on.
There's even an infrared camera that measures a heat signature, showing you a pedestrian or animal in the road up to 1000 feet away.
My favorite magic trick, made possible by this array of detection equipment, is Adaptive Cruise Control, the perfect road-trip companion.
My favorite magic trick, made possible by this array of detection equipment, is Adaptive Cruise Control, the perfect road-trip companion. It so accurately keeps the same distance behind cars in front of you, you'd think there was a ghost in the machine. Its spookiest feature is the way it can follow a car, say, into a tollbooth or in stop-and-go traffic, completely braking until the car stops. It practically mocks the car in front of you. Somebody pinch me, I must be dreaming.
Like an angel on your shoulder, the car tries to protect you, too. Its Braking Guard can actually stop the car if there's a collision about to happen, which I'm glad I didn't have the occasion to directly test. It's also smart enough to leave things alone if it senses you accelerating or swerving to avoid an accident.
My only concern when I was testing all this futuristic tech was that I would just sit back and let the car do everything, which Audi repeatedly cautions against in its owner's manual. Someday in the not-too-distant future, Audi won't have to publish those admonitions. Meanwhile, the S6 is getting ever so much closer to a self-driving car, and I was delighted by it.
Speaking of delights, the car is intricately configurable, letting you adjust its performance from comfort mode to dynamic mode which takes advantage of its extreme performance characteristics. You can configure the steering, making it more responsive for tight cornering, or looser for highway driving. You can do the same for the shock absorbers, giving it that cushy feeling of grandpa's Cadillac, or making it feel like a tightly tuned race car.
You can even adjust the sound of the engine, from an IndyCar roar to a civilized purr. But if you suddenly feel frisky, you can override all those ministrations, because when you floor the accelerator, everything defaults to the sportiest dynamic mode. For my testing, I tried all the modes, but kept it in dynamic mode most the time, so I could enjoy the astonishing acceleration and handling of this world-class sedan that felt and sounded like a Formula One racer. My only complaint was in dynamic mode, the car seemed to want to downshift when slowing down, making a smooth slowdown to a traffic light a challenge.
The positive aspect of dynamic mode is the way the automatic transmission lets the engine rev higher, making acceleration even more profound. And if you're not happy with any of the car's computerized shifting, you can take over yourself with a pair of paddles on the steering wheel, giving you total manual control of the shifts, letting you rev it up to near maximum so you can take advantage of the S6's tremendous torque.
While you're enjoying that neck-snapping acceleration, you can listen to a soundtrack to match.
While you're enjoying that neck-snapping acceleration, you can listen to a soundtrack to match. Our test car was equipped with the most monstrous car audio system I've ever heard anywhere. The 1,300-Watt Bang & Olufsen Advanced Sound System, a $5,900 option, has 15 speakers, allowing you to listen to Sirius satellite radio, HD/FM/AM radio, your smartphone audio or a CD at the highest possible quality. Its silky smooth high frequencies, convincing midrange and neighbor-annoying bass were lifelike to the point of absurdity. I was astonished by the quality of this system, rivaling the listening rooms of the most sophisticated audiophiles. This was the loudest, tightest and most impressive audio system I've ever heard, anywhere.
I rarely like to write the overused word "awesome," but this is an appropriate time to use that word. The Audi S6 is jaw-droppingly awe-inspiring, pushing me way back in its plush seat with its world-class acceleration, helping me out with the power of Google and the Internet, giving me a peek at what self-driving cars will someday be able to do, and giving me a tour of what most cars will have as standard equipment five years from now. If there's a better car in this world, I haven't driven it yet.
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