Lightweight touch makes Audi A6 Avant the right executive decision

SOMEONE, somewhere, at some point in time, arbitrarily decreed that the car of choice for executives should be a whopping big estate car. Perhaps it’s for ease of bundling golf clubs, children, hounds or large sacks of money into the back. Regardless, it’s left car manufacturers such as BMW, Mercedes and Audi with a conundrum to solve.

How do you make something that’s pretty much a hearse without the coffin exciting, efficient, luxurious and a pleasure to drive?

Audi’s solutions can be found throughout the new A6 Avant range, the first models of which were starting to be delivered throughout the UK this week.

This is the seventh-generation prestige estate car from Audi – the first being released around 40 years ago, so we know they know their stuff. Currently, there are four flavours of engine to choose from – a 3.0-litre, 296bhp TFSI (turbo) petrol, a 2.0-litre, 175bhp TDI (turbo) diesel with either six-speed manual or eight-speed multitronic transmission, a 3.0-litre TDI diesel with 201 bhp and a 3.0-litre TDI diesel packing 242 bhp.

Open for ordering later this month will be another engine – a 3.0-litre V6 TDI bi-turbo which takes 5.4 seconds to reach 62mph from a standing start and has a limited top speed of 155mph.

But it is the most fuel-efficient model, the 2.0 TDI, with a combined mpg of 56.5, that Audi expects to be by far the best-selling variation of the Avant, accounting for three-quarters of projected sales. It’s also the cheapest and lightest in the range, with the manual six-speed SE-trim model coming in at £32,100 and weighing 1,640kg. All models boast a decent 565-litre boot capacity with the rear seats upright.

This new wave of A6 Avants comfortably beats the previous range in terms of fuel economy, CO2 emissions, power, torque and acceleration, and that’s down to Audi’s determination to put its cars on a serious diet. Gross weight has been reduced by up to 70kg on some models. They haven’t torn out the seats or anything, and all the luxuries you’d expect in an Audi are still there. The weight loss comes from liberal use of aluminium instead of steel wherever possible – around 20 per cent of the body is made of the stuff.

All this makes for a pleasingly responsive and unfussy drive, and the 2.0-litre TDI is deceptively zippy when you put the foot down. The heavier 3.0-litre models feel exactly that – heavier. And the lower-riding S line models, some of which seem to have black rubber bands fitted to the optional 20-inch alloys rather than tyres, blur the line between “firm ride” and “frankly, a little bit uncomfortable ride”. Possibly not what you want if you spend a lot of your day driving around Scotland.

Looks-wise, the S line’s faintly sinister LED-lined headlamps, swooping lines and low ride height, coupled with the gigantic alloy wheels, almost do the impossible and make an estate car look cool.

The list of available options, as with any Audi release, is staggering.

Executives returning to their Avant after a trip to the shops or the bank, laden with groceries or large sacks of money, can simply wave a foot under the rear bumper and the boot lid automatically opens right up. Very handy.

For £2,100, you can add the night vision assistant with pedestrian detection, which uses thermal imaging to highlight on your console screen any warm-blooded humans wandering around ahead of you the dark. So you still might run over an investment banker or two.

There’s also the option to allow the navigation system to get involved with with things such as automatically adjusting your lights if it knows you’re approaching a junction. Creepy.

Things can start to get silly. The on-the-road price of the 3.0 TDI quattro SE S tronic is £40,140. The version I drove was simply groaning with an options list that ramped the price up to almost double that – £78,745.

For the price of a decent second-hand car – £6,300 – you can replace the perfectly good standard Bose sound system with a Bang and Olufsen one. For £2,710, you can get some LED headlights, although the standard halogen ones seem to work just fine. Then there’s ambient lighting (£595), massage and ventilation for front seats (£1,600), extended leather package (£680)… the list goes on.

There will always be some people/fleet managers who want to spend their money on these things, but the fact is, the most basic, lowest-powered standard version of the new Audi A6 Avant is luxurious enough, fast enough, comfortable enough and enjoyable enough for most people.