2019 Audi RS 4 Avant

By Alex Forrest

You don’t need a car that can carry 10 bags of garden fertiliser and still accelerate to 100km/h in less than five seconds. No one does.

But no one requires expensive wine, Italian shoes and labradoodles either, yet people buy them anyway.

The Audi RS 4 is like that. It’s a luxury which, like most luxuries, is both desirable and faintly absurd.

The mere fact that today’s automotive engineers can now give you a luxurious station wagon with 331kW and 600Nm that can also calmly sit in traffic on a boiling WA day, while the seats massage your back in air-conditioned comfort, is simply incredible.   

The RS 4 is not just a handy load-lugger and a stupendous sports car at the same time. You see, it’s also very good at being a luxury car.

It has an exquisitely crafted interior crammed with leather, aluminium and gloss black finishes. There’s a thick, leather-bound flat-bottomed steering wheel, while that seat massage function offers you three different styles: Wave, Stretch and Knead. 

Luxury also implies a level of exclusivity, which the RS 4 delivers thanks to its drive away price of $168,535.

The test car also had 20-inch alloy wheels plus the Technik package, which includes a head-up display and LED headlights.

The biggest news ushered in with the current RS 4 when it arrived in 2018 was its 2.9-litre, twin-turbocharged V6 engine, which replaced the 4.2-litre, naturally aspirated V8 in its predecessor.

Now, the V6 doesn’t sound as good as the V8, but the V6 does make the same power (331kW) and a lot more torque (600Nm compared to the old V8’s 430Nm).

Critically though, the V6’s peak torque output arrives early in the rev range – from as low as 1900rpm. The old V8 needed to rev to 4000rpm before its maximum torque arrived.

This makes the engine’s best performance outputs far more accessible than they were in the V8, and this RS 4 does out-perform its V8 predecessor.   

The price of the RS 4 has come down compared to the previous model too (by $18,000), but $168,535 is still a lot of after-tax dollars for most people.