Breaking old stereotypes: 2016 Audi TT quattro

By Christopher A. Sawyer
The Virtual Driver

(July 25, 2016) About 10 years ago, Audi was launching the then-new TT near Napa, Calif., and chose the highest, most sinuous trails it could find to show off the car’s dynamic capabilities. Co-driver and friend Tom Lankard took the first turn behind the wheel, and attacked the roads with gusto. But it didn’t take long before he grew bored by the confined nature of the roads (seemingly there were no sweepers or straights of any note), and aware that I was looking greener by the second as I fought motion sickness.


That’s when he suggested we throw the route book out the window, and blaze our own trail. Tom was intimate with the area, having driven the roads we were about to follow many times, and could get us to the lunch stop and most of the driver swap areas while sidestepping the roads Audi had laid out.

We had a blast that day, and arrived at the lunch stop before most of our colleagues. Some the support staff began to worry when we didn’t show up at the first driver swap point (it was on the Nausea Highway we decided to circumvent), but Audi’s two Saras (Hayden and Toycen) assured them Tom and I were fine and would magically appear at the appointed time and place as though nothing had happened. And we did, with big smiles on our faces, and a better understanding of the car than we could have gotten on the tight, twisty roads that we bypassed.

After lunch, Tom grabbed a TT Roadster with the dual-clutch setup, and we raced our way to the driver swap (an ice cream place, if I remember correctly) laughing each time the exhaust gave a sophisticatedly insolent braa-braap! as the transmission handed off from one gear to another.

With the ice cream shop in sight and Tom about to take over, he made perhaps the most insightful comment about a car I have ever heard on a launch drive program: “It’s too bad the hairdresser who buys this thing will never realize just how incredible this car is.”

The hairdresser image has stuck with the TT, but the latest iteration just might break free of that shadow. It is a gorgeous design, taut and trim, with a surface tension that plays off against the short overhangs and minimal ornamentation. No matter where I went (sadly, nowhere near roads as good as on that day in the Napa Valley), people commented on the car’s looks. There was not one bad comment, and women loved the almost arrogant masculinity of the sharp-edged grille, headlights and front fascia. This car has none of the Bauhaus baby fat of the original, though it shares the oversize wheel arches that have been part of the TT design from Day One.

Look inside, and the taut, crisp styling continues. Like so many upscale German cars, it borders on the anal-retentive, but stops short of parody because it does not try to do too much. This sparseness plays well against a virtual cockpit instrument cluster that lets you choose how prominent you want different sections to be (instrument, navigation, infotainment, etc.), without stepping over the line into too much tech, or trying to soften the look with trim that looks like it belongs around a mechanical gauge.

Once again, the air outlets are prominent, with curved blades, brushed alloy outer rings, and controls for the HVAC unit and heated seats on small round display screens within. There is no need for a conventional HVAC control unit in the center stack, making that section of the instrument panel sleeker.

As it has since the beginning, the hood wraps over the front fenders, the cutline rising and falling as it skirts the top of the wheel arch. Underneath sits a transverse 2.0-liter turbocharged four with 220 hp and 258 lb.-ft. of torque, capable of pushing the all-wheel drive coupe form 0-60 mph in 5.3 seconds.

A new quattro all-wheel drive system measures the traction at all four wheels, taking 150 readings every 10 milliseconds, and adjusting the front-to-rear torque split as needed. In a first for the car, putting the TT in Dynamic mode biases power to the rear wheels, which not only helps push the car through bends, but increases steering feel and precision slightly. You won’t mistake the TT for your favorite rear-drive sports car, but you will be surprised at how linear and composed its controls feel, each having a weight and resistance that complement one another.

And then there’s the price. As tested, our S tronic TT quattro will set you back $50,025. This includes the $3,250 Technology Package, $1,000 for the 19-in. wheels and tires, $1,000 for the S Sport Seat Package, $950 for the 12-speaker/680 Watt Bang & Olufsen sound system, and a $925  destination charge.

It’s a lot of money for a car that shares some of its underpinnings with the VW Golf, but is a veritable bargain — and a more useable road tool — than the BMW 650i tested not long after this car left our fleet. Audi’s TT has all the style and performance you require, and shifts through its various drive modes more seamlessly. The fact that it doesn’t push all of the requisite social status buttons as the more expensive BMW is its major failing.

But is it really such a problem when you can keep $40 grand in your pocket, and get closer to the edges of the performance envelope more often?

The Virtual Driver