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\nMy Q5 has been sitting in the shop for about a month now waiting for a part from Germany and I’ve been driving a loaner Q4 from my local dealer.<\/p>\n
\nMy Q5 has been sitting in the shop for about a month now waiting for a part from Germany and I’ve been driving a loaner Q4 from my local dealer.<\/p>\n
I’ve had it long enough that I feel like I can review it well enough!<\/p>\n
My main car is a Q5 e-tron plug-in hybrid. Its electric drivetrain is decent enough for low-speed driving in town, but the gas engine has to kick on for anything serious and that can make things feel a bit sluggish.<\/p>\n
Going from the hybrid system to an all-electric drivetrain is a massive upgrade. It’s easily my favorite thing about the Q4. <\/p>\n
When I want to pass someone on the highway I can just step on the gas and vroom vroom<\/em>. But because it’s an EV it just quietly zooms ahead without the loud engine noises.<\/p>\n If you enjoy cars and you take an EV for a spin, it’ll be very hard to stop thinking about it after.<\/p>\n Acceleration speed looks pretty mid on paper (a little over 5 seconds) but in practice it feels quite quick, even having enjoyed my 2016 A4 that boasted 0–60 speeds in 5.2 seconds. Not having to wait for gears to shift really makes a difference.<\/p>\n I’m tempted to test drive a Kia EV6 GT or Hyundai Ioniq5 N some time to experience those insane acceleration speeds but this default configuration feels good enough in a way I wasn’t expecting. I wouldn’t be surprised if I took an EV6 GT and stepped on the gas and felt “oh crap, this is too fast.”<\/p>\n Audi used to boast the best interiors of any mass-market car. If they are still in the lead it’s only because the rest of the car industry got worse too. The Q4 has a ton of paper cuts in the experience.<\/p>\n Audi has, for some reason, become allergic to knobs in the car. From what I can tell, there is just one knob, and it’s the control to adjust the mirrors. The rest have been replaced with flipper buttons and capacitive touch buttons.<\/p>\n The steering wheel lost its buttons and instead has one giant clicker button on either side, and depending on what region you press on, capacitive controls will determine what “button” you pressed. I can’t imagine it saved Audi anything on the bill of materials, and it feels cheap. The volume control is a touch slider that you can slide up and down with your thumb, but it’s worse than the knob it replaces; I can always precisely turn my volume up or down a single click on my Q5; on this Q4 it’s a crapshoot when I want to make a small tweak to the volume.<\/p>\n The touch screen on the Q4 is quite nice. I don’t like touch screens much in cars because it’s a dumb idea trying to touch a button on a touch screen while the car is moving, but Audi positioned this high-resolution screen at a more accessible angle and it feels decent. I’m still glad my Q5’s MMI is exclusively controlled with the knob, but I’m glad to see there are decent car touch screens out there still.<\/p>\n After I bought my Q5 I was surprised to discover it was missing a spare tire; that was an area Audi usually didn’t cheap out on. I figured it was because the car needed room for both the gas tank and battery and I assumed that Audi’s EVs would add the spare tire back. Not so in the Q4, and it feels chintzy. It’s not an everyday concern but a spare tire is one of those things that you are really happy to have the day you need it.<\/p>\n Audi’s car software has gotten to be utter garbage, and the cars overall are worse for it now.<\/p>\n This Q4 suffers an issue where every time I start the car I have to manually turn off the traffic sign-based speed warning beeps. Allegedly a dealer can install a software update that makes the car remember this between starts but I can’t confirm it’s a thing.<\/p>\n On at least one occasion the MMI got into a scenario where a dialog box was covering the rest of the screen but it was not dismissible. Once I got to my destination I needed to park the car and then follow steps to hard reboot the MMI.<\/p>\n You should NEVER have to do that in a car.<\/p>\n The UI\/UX of the car’s built-in touchscreen OS just isn’t good and it feels like it was designed by people who have never used a car sitting at a desk imagining what makes a good UI. There’s an inexplicable “Favorites” section on the home screen and I thought it might make it simpler to add the speed warning toggle to favorites to make it less tedious to turn off when I start the car, but it takes almost as many taps from Favorites as it does to turn off by going to the settings screens. To its defense, I did optimize the experience of turning off this setting by adding it as a favorite, rearranging my favorites so that vehicle settings favorites was the first group, and then adding the favorites section as one of the top-level tabs in the left sidebar. Every one of those steps was more painful than it should have been.<\/p>\n Icon arrangement on these screens is inconsistent which messes with my muscle memory. Taps sometimes fail to get detected, especially when I’m moving fast, and when you scroll with your finger to page through the home screen sections it does so with a sluggish frame rate I’d expect from an Android phone circa 2010 (not surprising; I think the MMI’s software is now based on Android Automotive). Audi’s MMI software wasn’t always like this either; my Q5’s works nicely and the UI is fluid and when I turn the knob to navigate, it just works. Same goes for my previous two Audis.<\/p>\n The car ostensibly has conveniences like being able to leave the climate control running when you leave the car, but you have two choices: either let it run for 30 minutes, or use a complex set of scheduled timers to control it. Has no one at Audi ever considered that maybe I might be leaving my car for, say, 45 minutes, and I’d like to have the AC kick on after a predetermined delay? It’s like someone had the feature in a to-do list and hastily banged out something without any thought to what might make the feature valuable.<\/p>\n Between these papercuts and the lack of differentiation of car form factor, I understand how Audi shipments have dropped dramatically in recent years. Car companies have internalized this mandate to make their cars software-driven above all, and not a single car company is capable of making good software to power their cars (and that goes for the upstarts too). Making software that’s so great that it feels like an appliance is really hard, and car companies don’t seem up for the challenge, but they’re doing it anyway.<\/p>\n If you’re not super fussy about details like I am you might get in this car and think it’s quite solid. But if you’re not super fussy about details in cars, why are you even considering an Audi?<\/p>\n The car market in the US has been in a weird place for the last couple of years, and EV sales are stalling a bit. I don’t believe it’s because Americans don’t like EVs; everyone I know who’s driven one loves the experience. The trepidation comes down to two things:<\/p>\nThe Bad<\/h2>\n
The Ugly<\/h2>\n
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