Audi RS6 Avant review

If you’d spent top-dollar on an RS6 back in the day you might’ve found the start-up a trifle underwhelming. Twist the dash-aimed key (remember keys?) and the V10 murmurs into life with all the fanfare of a rebooted laptop.

At town speed, you’re starved of clues this is one of the most absurd family cars ever devised. Sure, the ride’s a bit abrupt, but the powertrain simply moos along in the distance. At the time, this was one of the RS6’s great advantages over the M5 Touring – a proper automatic gearbox which could park and slur through traffic much more smoothly than the BMW’s staccato automated manual.

What happens when you clog it?

You go very far very fast, but the RS6 never changes character. There’s little sense of being hurled back in your seat, or of boost arriving. It just accrues speed with no let-up. It’s an incredibly elastic, torquey powertrain, and we suppose the great irony is that there’s very little to tell you you’ve got a faintly Lambo V10 up front.

Small wonder Audi decided to replace this car with a twin-turbo V8 which was almost as powerful but lighter and more responsive. This isn’t an especially memorable engine, but it is supremely effective for teleporting two tonnes of spacious Audi around. 0-62mph in 4.6 seconds was spaceship pace in the pre-EV world. The powertrain matches the looks really: incredibly muscular but also strangely subtle.

How about the handling?

Classic mid-2000s VW Group powerhaus, this. Very much out of the same Piech mould as the contemporary Golf R and Bugatti Veyron really. The RS6 is obedient but never interactive. Push harder than it would like and it tells you in a stern, loud voice that there’s a whopping 5.2 litres and ten cylinders craned out ahead of the front axle and a four-wheel drive system that never feel like it’s actually sending more than a third of the power to the big back tyres.

The steering’s numb, and what was actually quite a firm ride in 2008 feels charmingly roly-poly today. You can temper that with a wallowy Comfort mode, as all UK RS6s had Dynamic Ride Control. The firmest setting remains too concrete-y for human consumption.

So no, this isn’t an RS6 you’d set an alarm for a blast in. But when it’s dark by 4pm, it hasn’t stopped raining for a week and the roads are so mulchy it’s as though a compost heap’s been emptied onto your commute, this RS6 remains a point-to-point monster – just like the current RS6, and exactly in the vein of the original RS2 Avant all fast wagons owe a tip of the cap to.