2006 Audi S4 Test Drive

Draggin' Wagon

Zero to 60 mph in 5.3 seconds will blow away a Dodge Charger R/T and stay a tick ahead of a Honda S2000 roadster, even with two bicycles in back and a kayak on the roof.

Performance

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The S4 is a surprisingly quiet car at high speeds, despite the hint of an exhaust sound from its potent-looking quadruple tailpipes. The engine note is deep and powerful, but just sonorous enough under full throttle to let the world know there’s something special under the hood. And it’s so quiet at part-throttle cruise that you can easily forget you’re in fourth gear and not sixth.

The manual transmission is a joy to use — as snick-snick precise a shifter as I’ve ever used. ForbesAutos.com didn’t get a chance to test the S4 with a six-speed automatic, but its gear ratios were obviously chosen for economy as well as performance: For a minutely slower zero-to-60-mph time, you’ll get a 2-mpg better EPA highway rating with the automatic.

There was a time when a sensitive driver could tell they were at the helm of a front-wheel-drive Audi because there was a slight heaviness, a tiny resistance at the steering wheel. That’s no longer true. Audi has refined the front suspension to isolate the steering rack-and-pinion as much as possible from the effects of the driven wheels. The S4’s steering is light and precise.

All-wheel drive is a much-marketed but often misunderstood mechanism. All four wheels are powered only when the car is accelerating, rather than coasting or decelerating. When powering up a snowy driveway, AWD is a huge help. For an extremely skilled driver who is accelerating through a corner on a dry road, AWD can transfer the S4’s considerable torque to the road very effectively through all four tires. The same skilled driver can even use AWD to go fast in the rain.

For the rest of us, however, AWD can perhaps help us go faster in the wet, if that’s what you want to do, but only to the point where even a car with extremely good grip, like an S4, begins to lose it. That’s the instant when a race-car driver would carefully add throttle to increase the AWD system’s tenacity.

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But it’s also the point at which the vast majority of us would flush with a burst of adrenaline and lift off the throttle, thus eliminating any imagined advantage that AWD provides (remember, all four wheels are powered only under acceleration). It’s a phenomenon demonstrated on any Interstate during a snowstorm: Count the ditched SUV drivers who assumed they could go fast because they had AWD.

I easily got the S4 up to a comfortable 135 mph on a long, straight, deserted highway and a series of hard stops in rapid succession from this and similar speeds showed the brakes to be powerful, easy to modulate and fade-free. Audi has also adopted a feature that BMW pioneered: If the roads are wet, the hydraulic system regularly touches the brake pads against the rotors just hard enough to dry the discs so lightly that it’s unnoticeable to the driver.

The sport suspension — stiffer coil springs and shock absorbers and heavier anti-roll bars both front and rear — are uncompromisingly firm, and if there’s a downside to the S4 (besides its fuel economy), it’s that buyers need to consider seriously whether they want to put up with the ride harshness on a daily basis. After all, nobody buys a wagon as a weekend play car.