AUDI DOODY

Writer Ann Beattie greets the new Audi V8 Quattro

Cars

MARK GINSBURG

Things in Charlottesville, Virginia, seemed pretty quiet when we drove down to lend novelist Ann Beattie a new $48,000 Audi V8 Quattro sedan. Beattie, the "voice of her generation," has made Charlottesville her home for five years. She had just turned forty-two there and had also just finished Picturing Will (Random House), her latest novel. So she was cooling out, reading Spy magazine, and playing hostess to the occasional interviewer. She gave all her friends rides in the Audi, then motored down to North Carolina for a thorough shakedown.

During the trip she and her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry, listened to Rod Stewart, Tina Turner, and Rickie Lee Jones. "I didn't want to hear anything ethereal in the Audi. I really wanted some rolling-along music. That's because the car, in its way, seemed like a sports car to me," Beattie reported a week later, "a sports car inside a larger car. It was hard to know emotionally how to feel about the Audi, because it did seem like these two things were strangely combined."

Beattie intuited what prospective buyers who aren't given a week's test drive might never find out: that the Audi V8, for all its expensive hardware, is not a luxury car but a sports sedan. The superficial comparison, which Audi encourages, is to the Mercedes 420SEL, Jaguar XJ6, and BMW 735i—all about the same size and all equipped with powerful engines. But the V8 doesn't measure up to these luxury cars. It's not nearly as refined. It's much more of a kindred spirit to the swinging midsize BMW 535i, except that the V8's styling is conservative and faultlessly elegant, and conceals a sophisticated all-wheel-drive system.

Although federal agencies exonerated Volkswagen of America's Audi division in cases pertaining to "sudden acceleration," I wondered if Beattie harbored any residual concern about that issue. "Not really," she said. "After having driven it for a week I'm pretty persuaded, especially since they have a fairly annoying fail-safe system: you have to have your foot firmly on the brake before engaging the transmission, which has this shift lever that is not all that easy to move. Of course, that's a small price to pay," she added. But small prices are paid throughout the car. Like the hopelessly stupid instrument-panel lighting, shared with Saab, that stays on all the time. When you leave a brightly lit parking lot at night, you think your lights are on even if they aren't. The coup de grace is the neurotic apparatus that had warning lights popping on and off for no apparent reason, and that ultimately disabled the automatic transmission, leaving it stuck in third gear on my way to Beattie's house from Washington, D.C.

Gracious and understanding—they're seasoned Volvo owners—Beattie and her husband put me up for the night while we pored over the instruction manual and poked around in a mislabeled fuse box. Come morning we drove to the nearby Audi dealer, where an attentive service manager told us that if we left the car he would check its computer to see if any malfunctions were logged in its memory. During the probe, the car fixed itself. Evidently, if the automatictransmission oil exceeds a certain temperature, a few gears are locked out. Why? The legal department at work, no doubt. Following that incident, however, the transmission worked flawlessly, providing delightfully smooth shifts.

'It's very hard when you're hitting the directional signal not to hit the stalk for the light switch at the same time," Beattie pointed out. "And even if the light switch weren't there, the directional stalk is recessed too much, and too stubby, too much underneath the wheel, so you can't drop your hand in a fluid motion and hit it the way you can on other cars. Not the best thing in traffic." She also wasn't that comfortable behind the wheel. "The only other woman who drove the car around town was a photographer friend of mine who said just what I did, that the steering wheel isn't comfortably located." In fact, it leans distinctly to the left, as if it were designed for another Audi model.

MANUFACTURER'S SPECIFICATIONS

Audi V8 Quattro

• Vehicle type: five-passenger, allwheel-drive four-door sedan.

• List price: $47,450 (conies fully equipped).

• Engine type: thirty-two-valve, DOHC V-8.

• Transmission: four-speed automatic.

• Acceleration 0—60 m.p.h.: 8.7 seconds.

• Top speed: 146 m.p.h.

• Estimated E.P.A. fuel economy: 14 m.p.g., city; 18 m.p.g., highway.

"The seat controls are confusing," Beattie went on. "I was grateful for the one round button in between the other ones, since I had to touch them for a second to figure out which was which." The early-1960s-G.M.-style seat controls are a product of market research, just like the dashboard that is reflected in the windshield. Audi's North American managers conduct field surveys in the form of car clinics to find out what Americans like. Potential V8 customers, who are mostly in their fifties, like to have the controls where they were thirty years ago, way down near the floor, where they can't see them. The surveys also resulted in dashboards dyed the same color as the upholstery, instead of a glare-free black. Volkswagen of America's president, Hans-Jorg Hungerland, told me that a beige interior with a beige dashboard had been particularly popular here last year. Hence our matte gray dash, with its meticulous grain detail like elephant hide, which made looking through the windshield on a sunny day slightly disorienting.

I asked Beattie, who loved the Audi, if the specter of a rather low resale value would keep her from buying this car if, for example, Picturing Will became a blockbuster. "I've never bought a car on the basis of resale," she replied. "I'm given to understand from my friend in North Carolina that the V8 was really manufactured to rival the $60,000 Mercedes. I might like that even more. And I might like the Concorde even more than that. When we first got the car, I felt sorry for it. I thought, No one will ever love this car. No one would ever buy this car for status, yet it's very expensive. Unless, of course, word got around that it's very good. I think it's a quality machine, but I don't think the Pound Ridge [New York] people will think of it as a status symbol." In fact, Audi has another model, the excellent 200 Quattro, that is roughly comparable to the V8 and much less expensive, but doesn't come with an automatic transmission.

Though Beattie wouldn't buy a car for its resale value, perhaps unbeknownst to her, she has a car languishing in the garage that's fast appreciating: "Sixtyeight aqua Mustang convertible, V-8, automatic transmission, black top, shag carpeting—parked for years without a battery at my parents' house. They loaded it on a flatbed in Washington, D.C., and dumped the thing down here. My husband had it restored. Unfortunately, more of an external restoration than an internal one, as it's not running as of today," she sighed. "It was originally a bribe from my father: I was grumbling about giving up college, and dropping out. He decided that a nice new convertible of my dreams might make commuting to D.C. seem much more pleasant. It worked," she confessed.

"There's no need to advertise the fact that we're unusual," Beattie said when assured of the exclusivity an Audi V8 would offer. Only 2,500 units will be imported this year. "We're not nine-tofivers. We've got inflatable dinosaurs in our house." And a dowdy-looking Volvo in the driveway, which Beattie said drove like a truck compared with the dashing, muscular, albino Audi.

"I honestly like the V8's white paint," Beattie insisted. "It's sort of like the color I painted my fingernails with in high school. White cars usually look like variations of milk wagons, but this one has depth to it—a nice patina. And it doesn't look like it had confetti chopped up into the paint." The finish on the Audi was sublime; the car looked solid, classy, and expensive, though not especially distinctive.

What distinguishes the V8 from its supposed competitors is the Quattro all-wheel-drive system, which makes it a remarkably safe car in unsafe driving circumstances, such as on slippery roads, and around sharp curves. "I assume that's why it drove so smoothly and absolutely wonderfully in some conditions where I wouldn't normally even accelerate, like when it was a little rainy," Beattie noted. "A lot of the driving in North Carolina was on pretty straight roads, unlike here, like landing strips. So we tried to act accordingly: we pretended it was a plane. " Radar detector on, they experienced the effortless joy of 120 m.p.h. in the V8. "The handling on comers was very, very stable," she reported. Audi's Quattro system works full-time to deliver power to the wheels with the most traction, constantly adjusting the ratio from front to back or back to front. The system is available on all Audi models, and has been proved in grueling rallies.

"Do we get to keep the car?" Beattie implored. "The Volvo never starts. I'll be very sad to see the Audi go. I like all the electronic things, and the suspension is so good on the V8 that you feel very protected from the outside world," she maintained. "When I'm in the Volvo, I feel that the world is separate from me, and I don't particularly like that. I like the convertible and Lincoln's Mazda RX-7 because I don't feel that way. But for some reason, maybe just the fluidity of this car and the way it hugs the road, I really didn't feel alone in it. I felt like I was interacting with what was out there, which was a very nice feeling."