Audi A3 makes the smooth shift to a saloon

   
When it comes to Ireland’s love of the boot we’re up there with the Iranians, the Turks and the middle-class suburbanites of Tashkent. This has nothing to do with romanticising the years of Jack Charlton’s lads hoofing the ball up the pitch, nor a fondness for a bit of no-nonsense ass-kicking when it comes to policing. What we’re talking about is a car’s rear end.

 Hatchback me hat: if it’s not a saloon, then, according to the typical motoring bore in the bar, it’s only “a woman’s car”. According to these petrolhead pint-sippers, whether you can peek in at their luggage or not is a useful indicator as to the gender of a driver.

Most bars have an expert like this, holding court over his Heineken, and the more Pringle jumpers in the audience the more likely that the boot rule is taken as an unspoken social norm. After all, this guy’s best friend’s wife’s brother used to live next door to a mechanic, so it stands to reason he knows more than most about cars. And if he says that the ultimate expression of motoring manhood is a boot, then you need a boot.

We laugh off the ways of our crazy continental cousins, for whom a hatchback or even an estate (yes, they’re that open-minded when it comes to motoring needs) is the natural choice. And we ignore the fact that these days mainstream car firms start with the touring or estate version when designing cars and work back to the saloon when time permits. So when Audi announced it was doing a saloon version of the A3 I admit to feeling underwhelmed.

Once more a car firm was pandering to a ridiculously old-fashioned stereotype of what represents a family car. You could hear the sniggers of the engineers in Ingoldstadt: “Herman, stick a boot on that A3 for the crazy Chinese drivers and the bankrupt Irish. Let’s call it the A3 limousine while we’re at it.” Big surprise Yet this was one of the big surprises of the year to date; I really enjoyed driving this car. Part of the reason, I suspect, is that as the regular saloons have grown larger over the years they have lost some of their agility and fun. .

Despite claims at weight loss and chassis rigidity they can’t help but feel a little bloated when compared with their predecessors from a decade ago. What we have here with the latest saloon iterations of premium hatchbacks is a revival of the small, fun saloon.

The A3 saloon is not alone: the likes of the BMW 1 Series coupé and to a certain extent the Mercedes CLA have similar traits. These are cars that carry the modern tech of today’s cars but in the format and scale of the small saloons that made these brands so well regarded so many years ago. Driving the A3 saloon provokes a Proustian moment, whisking me back to the early iterations of Audi saloons.

Audi celebrates 40 years of ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’

Now synonymous phrase reaches its 40th anniversary in 2011 and is just as pertinent as ever.

• ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ (Advancement through Technology) tagline, which is synonymous with Audi values, was first used by the brand in Germany in 1971
• Advertising agency BBH brought the slogan to the brand’s UK advertising in 1983

‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ is 40 years young in 2011, and the sentiment in the famous motto – which translates as ‘advancement through technology’ – encapsulates the Audi philosophy just as perfectly now as it did way back in 1971.

In that year the famous slogan made its debut in a German publicity campaign. It was first used by Audi in its UK advertising in 1983, and at a time when the origins of the nascent brand weren’t widely known here, London-based advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) is credited with realizing its potential as a means of emphasizing German quality and engineering integrity.

Today, it is not only indelibly linked to the brand, but also one of very few ‘foreign’ phrases to have become firmly ingrained in British popular culture. It can be heard in everything from tracks by Blur and U2 to films such as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

The classic BBH television ad which gave birth to this star of screen and sound bite made the link between the now iconic Audi quattro and the permanent all-wheel-drive system that made it more agile on the road than a glider in the air.

But the phrase is rooted in the pioneering innovations and technical leadership the brand was already synonymous with long before this point.

The newly-formed Audi NSU range was so impressively diverse – it included rear-engined, air-cooled NSU 2- and 4-cylinder cars, front-wheel-drive Audi models with 4-cylinder water-cooled engines, the lightweight Audi 100 and the aerodynamically wedge-shaped and rotary-engined Ro 80 – that a unifying brand claim was needed to epitomise what all models had in common. ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ united the new range and summed up the brand‘s philosophy in one.

The Audi range of today, and tomorrow, is just as deserving of the phrase. It spans virtually every category from city-friendly sub-compact hatchback, via leading edge saloons and Avants, steamlined Sportbacks and agile SUVs through to the world renowned R8 super car. All 32 models in the current line-up are characterised by advanced technology, be it in the construction process as in the lightweight aluminium and steel hybrid-bodied TT or all-aluminium R8, in remarkable engines such as the award-winning 2.5-litre five-cylinder TFSI or in innovative features such as all-LED lighting, head-up displays, MMI with Google mapping functionality and in-car WLAN internet connectivity.