Audi A8 the stuff dreams are made of

It’s a real shakeup for the large luxury segment at the $200k-plus price point. For a very few, this car’s a real contender.  Audi will generate demand for plenty of A3s, 4s, 5s and 6s simply by fielding this flagship.

It really is only a very few people who buy cars in this upmarket segment too: statistically, fewer than one in 20,000 Australians (and just over one in 1000 car buyers) jump into this rarefied atmosphere. It’s really the difference between flying first class and economy.

So, what’s the new A8 like? The 4.2 V8 FSI-powered A8 is a glorious drive.  As a luxury flagship the A8 is sportier than you’d expect. Getting the balance of engagement and luxury right must be a tough act – but with this car, Audi’s engineers have got it right.

The 4.2 FSI engine delivers 273kW and 445Nm – a step up from the predecessor – and yet the A8 still returns 9.5L/100km in the official combined cycle fuel test.  It’s also 0.4 seconds quicker to 100km/h, compared with its predecessor.

This is all thanks in part to the aluminium body, plus a commitment to efficiency-based developments (lower friction, better thermal management, and even an on-demand oil pump) that Audi says make the car 13 per cent more efficient overall. There’s even an eight-speed tiptronic with shift-by-wire technology rendering mechanical linkages obsolete.

Then there’s the super slippery drag coefficient: 0.26.  The A8 went on sale in September with the 4.2 FSI petrol V8 – the first in a range of variations due in coming months, some of which (like the stretched A8 L long-wheelbase luxury flagship) you will get an exclusive preview of at the Show.

Versions in the pipeline include the 3.0-litre TDI and a 4.2-litre V8 TDI (coming in that order). There’s no word yet on ‘when’ for the S8, but it’s going to be a standout.

This new car is packed with technology – including a touchpad for inputting data into the multimedia interface by scrawling them with the tip of your finger. Nice.

Safety? You bet. A raft of hi-tech features that blur the line between passive and active safety-tech. Audi calls it Pre Sense, which takes action – like shutting the windows and tensioning the seatbelts  - if it thinks you’re likely to crash. The system can detect threat from in front, from behind and at the side.

It also warns the driver, pre-fills the brakes and – if warnings are ignored – is capable of whipping up a textbook emergency stop. It has a four-stage intervention approach – usurping control from the driver only as a last resort.

There is also a really neat night vision option. Using a forward-looking infrared camera the system displays the scene ahead on a screen between the tacho and the speedo. Animals and pedestrians are detected as far away as 300m – beyond the range of the headlights – and smart software analyses their movement.

Anything that’s detected gets a yellow box painted around it. Threats likely to move in front of the car are wrapped in a red box. It’s both useful and very, very cool. In a James Bond kind of way.