Audi Q7: Packs power, luxury into SUV

Here's a very nice read about the Audi Q7.

We have driven from New Jersey, just outside Manhattan, to a mountaintop at the Skytop Lodge and Resort in the Pocono Mountains. We have splashed through water, pushed through mud, and crawled with confidence over rocky projections along the sometimes steep trail. The booming of blasting shotguns echoes around us, from a nearby shooting range.

We got up here tucked into the elegant if subtle luxury of Audi's late entry into the big-SUV market, the 2007 Q7.

Audi aficionados who also want big, burly, powerful, elegant, and still distinctively Audi will love the Q7.

And it is powered, in the model hitting showrooms next month, by a 4.2-liter V-8 that produces 350 horsepower and transfers its torque -- using Audi's nifty constant all-wheel-drive quattro system -- through a six-speed Tiptronic transmission.

That's a lot of horsepower and, frankly, it felt like more as we climbed, darted, cornered, and plodded.

And to the most excellent burble of its purposely tuned exhaust system (think and hear American muscle car), I was able to use the manual mode of the transmission to forgo brakes in controlling the SUV down winding, steep roads and to upshift nimbly.

Related news: GermanCarBlog, P4MR, Audi Q7

Source: Boston Globe, picture by Audi

Audi Q7: Packs power, luxury into SUV

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