Horses for Courses – Audi Q7 Sport Utility Vehicle

“Horses for courses,” is an old horse racing expression meaning that some horses race better on certain tracks than on others; wet vs. dry, long vs. short, turf vs. dirt, etc.  Applied to people, it means choosing the person ideally suited for a particular job on hand.  

Applied to cars, it means that if you’re introducing a new Jeep, you convene the media at a lodge in the mountains and let them drive over boulders and through hip-deep water.  If you’re Audi, however, and you want to introduce the first sport utility vehicle in your company’s history -- a stylish, muscular machine called the Q7 -- you choose a stylish venue as a starting point for the introductory experience, in this case the Four Seasons hotel overlooking the ocean just north of San Diego.

And you design a driving course suitable to the vehicle and the way in which it will be most often be driven -- winding roads through the mountains, freeways and a brief trip to the top of a mountain on a smooth and scenic dirt road.  In each of these conditions the Q7 behaved as you would expect an Audi to behave; capably, comfortably, quickly.

That said, a closer look is certainly warranted.  Built at the VW plant in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava, the Q7 shares its basic platform with the Porsche Cayenne and VW Touareg but is six inches longer and is not designed for heavy-duty off-roading.  This allows the Q7 to be 330 pounds lighter (with the attendant fuel economy benefits) and still perform every task an owner is likely to request of it.  And the optional, driver-controlled adaptive air suspension offers a variety of ride height and road handling choices to extend those capabilities still further.

Under the hood, at present, is a 4.2-liter V-8 delivering 350 horsepower to the Quattro all-wheel drive system through a 6-speed automatic transmission.  0 to 60 mph acceleration is seven seconds, top speed is electronically limited to 130 mph and fuel economy is 14 mpg around town and 19 mpg in the highway.  A 280 horsepower, 3.6-liter V-6 will be offered later this year, and a high-performance model with a V-10 engine is rumored to be in the works.
 
The Q7’s interior is offered in both 2-row (5- or 6-passenger) and 3-row (7-passenger) seating configurations… all with standard side airbags.  Also standard are no fewer than 10 cupholders, so dehydration shouldn’t be a problem.  Cleaning juice-box goo off the leather upholstery, however…

Technology is Audi’s forte, and the Q7 features such electronic amenities as ‘Side Assist’ that warns you when a vehicle is in your blind spot, and, perhaps the most useful urban accessory of all, Adaptive Cruise Control that works in stop-and-go traffic.

There are certainly plenty of SUVs on the market these days, but if only German will do and the driveways in your neighborhood are already full of BMW X5’s and Mercedes ML350’s, then the Q7 ($50,000 - $60,000) is just the steed for your need.

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