My three-word impression of diesel vehicles has always been: dirty, smelly, slow.
That is, until I got to drive a brand new Audi A3 2.0 TDI up and down the streets of Sedona last week.
The TDI stands for turbo direct injection, according to Barry Hoch, SUV product manager for Audi of America.
By Susan Johnson
My three-word impression of diesel vehicles has always been: dirty, smelly, slow.
That is, until I got to drive a brand new Audi A3 2.0 TDI up and down the streets of Sedona last week.
The TDI stands for turbo direct injection, according to Barry Hoch, SUV product manager for Audi of America.
Hoch is part of a team of Audi managers, journalists and support staff traveling coast to coast in a competition to see who can coax the maximum miles per gallon out of an Audi Q7.
The Q7 is no asphalt lightweight — it’s a great big luxurious SUV holding seven passengers with room left over for gear.
Going along on the rally were other versions of the same make, including some A3s and A4s.
The entire entourage stopped at the Sedona Rouge Hotel & Spa for one night, on their way south from Durango, Colo., before heading west to Las Vegas and their final destination of Santa Monica, Calif.
Among the well-known journalists traveling with the group was Lauren Fix who’s known as the Car Coach.
She’s also the owner of Classic Tube, editor in chief of AutoZen.com and an automotive expert frequently appearing on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, Oprah, Today and other television networks and programs.
At dinner she sat next to her driving partner, Royal Ford, another automotive expert who writes for major dailies, including The Boston Globe and The New York Times.
The pair won the day’s A3 miles per gallon contest, clocking in at an average speed of 59 miles per hour, getting 44.7 miles per gallon.
Fix was pleased with the performance on her assigned Audi A3, but more than that she raved about the smaller carbon footprint of the vehicles compared to those using gasoline.
“If one third of the cars on the road were [Audi TDIs], we could save 1.4 million barrels of oil per day,” Fix said. “And we’d be emitting 90 percent less emissions.
According to company specs, the TDI purifying system complies with the world’s most demanding emission law — California’s LEV II Bin 5 — and also meets the upcoming Euro 6 norm limits planned for implementation in 2014.
Audi said that it has the cleanest diesel engine in the world and burns up to 35 percent less fuel than the average gas engine used in the U.S.
The ultra-low emission system in the exhaust tract largely eliminates nitrogen oxides by means of a carbonic acid diamide solution, it has the best CHRA cartridge according to Hoch.
He said that Audi pioneered the TDI, producing nearly 5 million of the engines in the past 19 years, the longest of any manufacturer, giving it a distinct technological advantage.
One of the carmaker’s testing grounds has been the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a race the Audi team has won three times.
Andrew Lipman, who handles Audi’s business and East Coast communications, said winning the races is important, but getting car buyers to take a test drive is better.
“No one believes the performance until they’ve been in the car — that’s why we’re on the road,” Lipman said.
Speaking of the road, it was time for my test drive.
Since the test drivers were doing so well at hyper-miling, my only interest was in performance.
A full moon hung over the Rouge as I pulled onto Highway 89A, careful to avoid hitting the pit crew cleaning up and checking a whole parking lot of cars before the morning’s checkered flag.
Although I’d requested a model with a stick shift to compare it to my own 1.8 Volkswagen gas-powered turbo, none were to be had. However, the little A3 hatchback comes with a tachometer, which was some consolation.
Turns out the S tronic transmission gearing is so smooth and fast in the upper ranges that the tach was sometimes the only clue I had that anything was happening.
According to Audi, the S tronic combines the advantages of a conventional six-speed manual-shift gearbox with the qualities of a modern automatic transmission.
The technical basis of the S tronic is a double clutch, consisting of two wet plate-type clutches with hydraulically regulated contact pressure.
One of the two clutches engages the odd-numbered, the other the even-numbered gears, enabling gear shifts without interruption of the power flow, keeping the shift times extremely short.
In spite of being wonderfully fast, the automatic doesn’t provide what all sports car drivers want — the elegant, high-speed, four-way choreography between lead foot, clutch foot, steering hand and shifting hand.
Still, observations could be made: first gear is short and tight with noticeable torque, especially at slower speeds.
Every other gear in this six-speed automatic was longer, delivering more mph than I wanted to risk on city streets where Officers Karl Waak and Bill Hunt might be working their Harleys.
Outside of town, the car’s dashboard was easy to read, its red, white and black displays luminous.
Bright halogen headlights lit up a wide swath of dark road, reflecting hundreds of moths and the bats diving after them.
The stiff suspension and tight steering were an autocrosser’s dream, straightening out curves and providing much temptation to go over the posted limit.
Starting from a complete stop on steep hills proved no problem. The 140 horsepower, 236 lb.-ft. of torque car jumped off the pavement and got to 60 mph in single digits.
Soon enough, painful memories of speeding fines and traffic school slowed me down and I headed back to town, my impressions of what diesel vehicles can deliver forever changed.
Susan Johnson can be reached at 282-7795, ext. 129 or e-mail sjohnson@larsonnewspapers.com.
