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Well, the Top Gear lot have had their mucky paws on the A1 over in Berlin. A bit scathing, but worth a read.
The link is here, but Ive popped the entire text into one page below, along with the Pictures.
Top Gear: Audi A1, City Slacker
Words: Paul Horrell
Photos: Lee Brimble
Imagine living in east Berlin in the Seventies and Eighties, peering across the wall to the western sector of the city, the yoke of political, economic and intellectual repression bearing down on you. No more potent symbol existed of the West German economic miracle, and of freedom itself, than the German luxury car. Now, two decades on from the fall of that hated wall, people from the old east have got more prosperous, and at the same time the price of driving a German luxury badge has come down to meet them. Here's the Audi A1.
It's a small car with just two fairly cramped back seats, but it leans on the zeitgeisty allure of low fuel consumption, customisable cosmetics, and connectivity for music, phones and the internet. Ah, a car for the youth market, then.
Go to Stuttgart, or most of the other powerhouses of the former West Germany, and far too many of the youth look likelittle more than po-faced apprentice human economic units. Berlin feels different. It oozes creativity and culture, not just the highbrow kind - though it's globally pre-eminent in classical music - but the cosmopolitan, the left-field, the progressive, the experimental, the cheeky, the counter-cultural. While Audi probably isn't going to sell a lot of A1s to the graffiti artists and lo-fi hip-hop crowd, their effect on the city of Berlin is to give it the sort of vibe that's a magnet for a huge number of the goateed media types, polo-neck-wearing architects and young entrepreneurs who are the A1's core constituency.
We head off across the city on the urban motorway network. Hmmm, this 1.6 diesel is a bit gruff, and none too lively. In an S-Line car of these ambitions, 0-62 in 10.5secs doesn't really cut it. But at least the torque spread is wide and even, so you can relax about timing your gearshifts. Only five gears in the 'box too, and a slow shift with it. Luckily, things are better on the petrol front: there's a much more agreeable 122bhp 1.4 TSi that has low-down torque, a sweetness high up and easily beats a petrol Mini Cooper for real-world acceleration, thanks to its turbo.
The link is here, but Ive popped the entire text into one page below, along with the Pictures.
Top Gear: Audi A1, City Slacker
Words: Paul Horrell
Photos: Lee Brimble
Imagine living in east Berlin in the Seventies and Eighties, peering across the wall to the western sector of the city, the yoke of political, economic and intellectual repression bearing down on you. No more potent symbol existed of the West German economic miracle, and of freedom itself, than the German luxury car. Now, two decades on from the fall of that hated wall, people from the old east have got more prosperous, and at the same time the price of driving a German luxury badge has come down to meet them. Here's the Audi A1.
It's a small car with just two fairly cramped back seats, but it leans on the zeitgeisty allure of low fuel consumption, customisable cosmetics, and connectivity for music, phones and the internet. Ah, a car for the youth market, then.
Go to Stuttgart, or most of the other powerhouses of the former West Germany, and far too many of the youth look likelittle more than po-faced apprentice human economic units. Berlin feels different. It oozes creativity and culture, not just the highbrow kind - though it's globally pre-eminent in classical music - but the cosmopolitan, the left-field, the progressive, the experimental, the cheeky, the counter-cultural. While Audi probably isn't going to sell a lot of A1s to the graffiti artists and lo-fi hip-hop crowd, their effect on the city of Berlin is to give it the sort of vibe that's a magnet for a huge number of the goateed media types, polo-neck-wearing architects and young entrepreneurs who are the A1's core constituency.
We head off across the city on the urban motorway network. Hmmm, this 1.6 diesel is a bit gruff, and none too lively. In an S-Line car of these ambitions, 0-62 in 10.5secs doesn't really cut it. But at least the torque spread is wide and even, so you can relax about timing your gearshifts. Only five gears in the 'box too, and a slow shift with it. Luckily, things are better on the petrol front: there's a much more agreeable 122bhp 1.4 TSi that has low-down torque, a sweetness high up and easily beats a petrol Mini Cooper for real-world acceleration, thanks to its turbo.
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