Audi A6 Avant: A wagon without a hitch

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The Audi A6 Avant brings culture to the culture of entitlement.

The A6 Avant is a car for people with money who would really rather not make an issue of it - your anonymous-opera-benefactor types.

It's also quietly gorgeous. Redesigned for 2006, the station wagon has a newly sleek skin that looks curried by the wind, a restyling that buffs out any linearity of the previous design, which wasn't exactly boxy to begin with. All the exterior detailing is vacu-formed, sucked into the bodywork: The glass and polished window surrounds are nearly flush; the door handles are embedded into the sheet metal; the lighting instruments (including the new LED tail lamps) wrap around like a military contractor's sunglasses. With its tapering glass canopy and converging rays rising from the rocker panels, the car has fluid geometry and organized energy, not hugging the ground but hovering just slightly above it.

I can't think of a luxury car with a better sense of the moment. Audi will sell the car in the United States only with a 3.2-liter, 252-hp V-6 motor - reversing a long-standing trend among European carmakers of exporting cars with the biggest motors they can stuff under the hood (the sedan is available with a 4.2-liter V-8).

Everything in the Audi catalog is available in what is essentially a midline car. Sometimes luxury carmakers will make desirable features exclusive to their top-of-the-line models, which can have the effect of driving buyers into bigger cars than they need. The A6 Avant seems like a template for a next generation of premium, have-it-all cars with smaller footprints.

GermanCarBlog, Audi A6

Source: Daily Press

Audi A6 Avant: A wagon without a hitch

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