>> Hatchbacks are sure handy for carrying your stuff. But they've always had a stigma when it comes to a premium car, like an Audi A3. Think BMW 318TI for example. Let's see if this guy can overcome the stigma, and wow us with its tech.
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Now the engine's a big part of the story on this car because it is a two oh turbo S line A3. Obviously two liter inline four transverse mounted, turbocharged engine, two hundred horsepower. The turbo lag is pretty minimal on it, I was very pleased about that. Direct port fuel injection, yada yada ya. But what's really great is where that power goes. Come inside, I'll show you. Now I love the transmission in this car. It's an Audi DSG, a direct shift gearbox, six speed, but it's not an automatic that you can shift like a manual. It's a manual that can also act like an automatic, and there's a key difference there. This car has two clutches, but you never encounter a clutch pedal because it's all done electronically, either through these paddles here on the wheel, or through the gate shifter, or if you're in automatic mode the car handles it for you. But you just mash it, and just kick the thing, and the shifts are instant. Now once you stop playing with your DSG and decide you got to actually get somewhere, you can use the nav system for that. Our car does have the optional nav, it's a pricey upgrade by the way. No touch screen for that money, smallish but adequate size LCD. My biggest gripe though is the interface for entering destinations. I find that this little wheel here with the alphabet around it is frustratingly tiny. Once you get the actual inputs in there, I felt like the system was slow on actually accepting each character, and then slow again in the actual navigation. It felt a few hundred feet late all the time. I don't know, I've seen this unit before, and I swear it worked better in other Audis. The audio system in this car base is AM FM, single disc CD, and prepped for Sirius satellite radio. Our system, because it has nav, bumps that up to a BOSE premium system, symphony sound they call it, and an odd mix of disc players. You've got a six disc CD changer over here in the glove box that will handle standard audio CDs, and then if you want to play MP3 or data CDs with music files on them, you have to open up the power lid for the navigation, take out the DVD-ROM disc that lives in here, and stick in your MP3 CD, because that's the only drive in the car that will read them. Oh by the way, did you see these? Yeah. The SD card slots just won't go away on the Audi vehicles. Okay, let's talk about portables and iPods. There is both an Audi iPod interface available, and an Audi music interface. The iPod's interface connects to iPods. The Audi music interface will connect to a variety of players using various cables. So there's an eighteen pin connector in the glove box, and then you've got various cables that'll match to your MP3 player. This makes me crazy. It's a small thing, but check this out. You engage the parking brake, bonk, it moves the console up. So you put the brake down, figure you'll lower the console, but you can't cause you got to ratchet the console all the way back before you can put it all the way down. Now getting our phone connected to our Audi A3 is an interesting mix. We have the technology package on this car which includes Bluetooth, but there's also back here in the console, evidence of a dockable connector. And sure enough, Audi has a dock solution. Like Mercedes, you've got a two-headed thing here, Bluetooth and or dock, the dock of course performs better, but has to be specific to your phone. Let's price out our Audi A3 two point oh Turbo S-Tronic. That mouthful does mean we get the DSG gearbox, then we added thirty three hundred bucks for the navigation system and the upgraded BOSE audio as I showed you. Eleven hundred dollars for this open sky double panel glass roof, fifteen hundred bucks for the technology package, that's the hands-free phone technology, and steerable bizeenon [assumed spelling] headlights. All in, about thirty six thousand out the door.
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