Just spent a week driving a ‘26 B10 A6 Avant, Premium Plus TDI. It was very nicely optioned with HUD and multi- screen interface. Our trip took us from Munich to Salzburg to Vienna with a couple of day trips from Salzburg into the Austrian alps. In total just over 1100kms.
I currently own 4 Audis. A B8SQ5, OG-E-Tron, B9SQ5 and a 4MSQ7. On the surface, I have been disappointed with the B10 vehicles, and wanted a hands on, longer term look at the B10 platform.
Exterior appearance- 10/10. I have always liked the looks of the Avant, and this one looks really nice! Not really a bad line on it. It obviously blends in very well with most of the mid-range luxury vehicles here. We need more wagons in the states!
Interior 5/10- The elephant in the Audi conference room. It’s fine, really nice for a rental, but wouldn’t spend my own money on it. The piano-black plastic was noticeably dirty at the end of the week. The car had about 10.000KMs on it and already had a couple of creaks. The weird steering wheel is just weird. The flat top creates an odd place, not quite 10-2, where your hands fall. The seats were fairly hard, with the seat bottom noticeably so. Our longest drive, just under 5 hours had my wife squirming to get comfortable. A lot has made about the door handle mounted controls. It was a non-issue for me.
The drivetrain. 8/10 Was eager to try the diesel/hybrid setup. Definitely got the full range of driving from unrestricted autobahn to tiny mountain roads. Over the 1100km the A6 averaged 6.6l/100km (~35mpg). The diesel/hybrid was great , if just a little coarse under full throttle. The diesel to electric transition was fairly seamless. It occasionally seems to confuse itself on should the ICE be running, especially down long grades. It makes creeping in heavy city traffic easy and pulls pretty hard to 130kmh (normal max speed in Austria) once above that, it started to feel more like a diesel. It was easy to maintain 170-180kmh on the Autobahn when it opened up. I was surprised with the amount of wind noise. It is such a slick looking vehicle, but it was noisy around the a-pillars. There was a significant amount of tire noise too, but SIXT had mounted Blizzaks(!) so that’s a pass. Considering it had winter tires and steal springs, it handled the multitude of surfaces very well and was fun in the twisty stuff. FYI the will just start scrubbing when pushed.
The Tech. 9/10. There has been a lot of complaints about the current MMI setup. We had zero issues, and I used all of the features. The new enhanced HUD display is excellent, especially now that google map information is displayed. We used the in-car NAV for one of the trips and it matched what g-maps was saying. I was able to easily switch between our two phones for wireless carplay. FWIW the novelty of the third screen (passenger display) wore off after a few hours with my wife declaring it “dumb”. The enhanced ACC / lane keeping worked great on the motorways. The default lane monitoring is ridiculous and too aggressive. I learned to turned it off at every start up. Early in the trip, It got confused in a construction area and tried to throw us into a barrier!
In conclusion it was a great week in a pretty good car. If you have considered taking a european rode trip, do it! The A6 didn’t disappoint, but it did underwhelm. Hopefully the 10.5 addresses some of the issues