Cars.com's Joe Wiesenfelder takes a look at the 2010 Audi S4. It competes with the BMW M3, Cadillac CTS-V, Lexus IS-F and Mercedes C63 AMG. Videographer: Matthew Avery Producer: Eric Rossi
Transcript
<v Narrator>Cars.com auto review. (upbeat music) Hi, I'm Joe Wiesenfelder with cars.com. I have here an Audi S4 Sedan. S means it's the souped up version of the A4 sedan. Now, the A4 was redesigned for 2009. Trailing by one year, the S4.
Now that's all about the look, but the reason this car is a sleeper is it has a lot of performance under the hood. If you notice, the regular A4 says 2.0 T, which is two liter turbocharged, four cylinder. Here, you'll notice it says V6: larger engine. And here the T stands for supercharged. Why? Old habits die hard? They don't wanna have too many S's on the S4? I have no idea. Now the A4 has a 211 horsepower. This is the three liter supercharged V6, and a little wayward T there again. This one has 333 horsepower. Now that's actually down a bit, about seven horsepower from previous generations, giant V8, but it's up 23 pound feet of torque. Now what that gives you, is roughly the same performance, but what's great about it is fuel economy. Five miles per gallon better in the city, seven miles per gallon better in the highway. So that's one of the things that's better about this generation. Now that leads us to the second advantage in the new generation, which is this car doesn't have a gas guzzler tax like the previous one did. Between that and a lower starting price, it's $4,400 cheaper than the last S4 Sedan, which was sold in 2008. Now, when you get in, you'll find reminders that you're in an S4 everywhere: steering wheel, door sills, seats. Now the most important improvement over the previous generation in terms of performance is the Quattro all-wheel drive car comes only with all-wheel drive. In the previous generation, it split the power, the torque front and rear 50 50%. Now it sends 60% to the rear, and that gives you the feel of rear wheel drive car. It's much easier to control with the accelerator. Generally speaking, the car handles really well, better still than the previous generation. In terms of performance, that's definitely the biggest improvement. So those three main advantages: lower price, better fuel economy, and all-wheel drive that's biased to the rear. Not a bad car for about $47,000. Now, if you want higher performance than that, something that'll compete with a BMW M3, you're just going to have hope for an RS 4, which adds an R, and probably a bunch of T's too, because apparently they're cheap. <v Narrator>For more car related news, go to cars.com or our blog kickingtires.net.
