To a greater extent than any car I have driven in recent months, the new Audi A1 turns heads. Wherever I went, it had people twisting and craning for a look.
Who are you, though, if this ice-cool, compact hatchback works like a magnet on your neck? The Audi people have done their research in this area and they think that you are mostly young and suspect that you may, occasionally, be a woman. You enjoy (naturally) an “active lifestyle” — but then, all manufacturers say this about their customers, which is quite funny, really, given that car buyers are specifically people who can’t be fagged to walk.
Anyway, you live, apparently, in a large city and are interested in (Audi is gloriously specific about this) “design, music, fashion and sports”. You are also working on a novel set in America during the Great Depression of the 1930s and when you were growing up you had a pet hamster called Herbie. (I made up the bits about the novel and the hamster.) It’s also possible that you are someone who has been blithely thundering about town in an Audi A6, but who is now drawn to consider smaller, more frugal vehicles through fears about the destiny of a post-carbon planet, or, alternatively, by job loss. (Some are born to downsize. Some have downsizing thrust upon them.) Or perhaps you want the A1 to go alongside the A6, as a second car for those smaller journeys, which is like downsizing and upsizing at the same time.
The last time Audi went this way we ended up with the squidgy A2, which, to my eyes, looks like a baby’s shoe and, legendarily, pitches from side to side when you turn on its windscreen wiper. The A1 is immediately far more solid and a far groovier proposition.
Indeed, grooviness experts have declared their conviction that it outgrooves the A2 by a factor of anything up to 200, and may even be the grooviest car in the entire Audi range.
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Poised to pounce, the body seems to squat on its axles as if the A1 were a friction toy and a giant, unseen hand had already pressed down on it and dragged it backwards across the carpet, ready to send it skittering forwards into the leg of the coffee table (or, in this case, up the A3 in the direction of Cobham).
I confess, the intended resemblance of the dashboard to an aircraft wing and the four circular air inlets to jet engines passed me by until I read about it afterwards, but these things often work on a driver subliminally and, in retrospect, I suppose it would explain why, every time we stopped, I asked the person next to me in the passenger seat if she would mind putting the cabin doors to manual.
Fabulously well-built and sumptuously kitted out, the A1 can be ordered with one of two trim levels, “Attraction” or “Ambition”, the second of which adds some boastful alloys, a snorty exhaust pipe and presumably makes the car unpleasantly competitive on the squash court. Ambition is, in the main, a good thing, of course, but would you want your ambitiousness to be so naked that you ordered your car with a trim called “Ambition”? Also, isn’t it the masterfully cute thing about the Audi brand that it proposes a sublime indifference to pushiness, even while selling cars to pushy people in their thousands?
On the plus side, though, you do get the sports-style driving seat, which grabs a firm hold of your kidneys and doesn’t let go as you slalom smoothly — and, indeed, ambitiously — round corners. Followed by twisting necks, all the way.
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Audi A1 1.6 TDI Sport
Price £15,675
Top speed 118 mph
Acceleration 0-62 in 10.5 seconds
Average consumption 70.6 mpg
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CO2 emissions 105 g/km