2020 Audi Q3 S Line Quattro Review and Off-Road Test (feat. BMW X1)

On this episode, we take the Audi Q3 on a mountain adventure. It's coming up right now on Driving Sports TV. I'd like to thank you for watching. If you haven't yet, please take a moment to subscribe. Our goal for 2020 is to reach 250,000 subscribers by the end of the year, and we'll definitely need your help to make that possible. Now let's take a look at the latest from Audi. The Audi Q3 is a compact luxury crossover that helped define the segment when it first hit the street in 2012. Now in its second generation, the smallest Audi crossover has significant upgrades to compete directly against its closest rival, the BMW X1. The model we're testing today is the mid-level Premium Plus S-Line trim, with a few extras thrown in. Prices you see it here, $43,890 including destination. All new in 2019 and carried into 2020 unchanged, the new Q3 features a 2-liter turbocharged inline-4 as a standard engine here in the U.S. This mill puts out a peak 228 horsepower and 258 pound-feet of torque. It's connected to an 8-speed automatic transmission, and it powers all four wheels with a Haldex-based all-wheel drive system. Yeah, you can ignore the badge, this system is not the same one found in the more expensive Audis. EPA rates this setup at 27 miles to the gallon on the highway, and 19 around town. In Europe, you can get a Q3 with a manual transmission and a diesel engine. Unfortunately, here in the States, neither of those options are available. You can get it as an electric, kind of. They actually call that the e-tron, and we do hope to have a separate review on that later this year. In the back, the Q3 holds up to 23.7 cubic feet of gear, with its second row in place. Fold it down for up to 48 cubic feet of stuff. That is sizably smaller than the BMW X1, which boasts up to 58.7 cubic feet. Rival options have either run-flat tires or a fix-a-flat. Under the floor of the Audi is a space-saver spare. Second-row passengers get their own cubbies for seat-side storage. Cabin space is sizable for the class, with plenty of room for an adult. Passengers also get DC and USB sockets, reclining seats, and a fold-down armrest with integrated cup holders. The X1's second row does feel more spacious, thanks to a larger panorama sunroof, but both will be fine for even long trips. Interior trims have been Audi's strength for decades, and here they've delivered another stunning design, with a couple caveats. For the most part, the materials are superb, with sculpted seats that are infinitely adjustable. They're also heated. Unfortunately, no seat cooling, though. As if they ran out of space while designing it, the power and stereo volume knobs are awkwardly tacked onto a piece of unremarkable plastic right in front of the shifter. In fact, there's more than a few pieces of hard plastic here, placed right next to the nicer inserts. It's a bit uneven. Our test car came with the optional 12.3-inch virtual cockpit screen, which is as beautiful as always. Three-way climate control is also standard. The transmission selector does have a nice leather insert and feels good on the hand, but it is hard to read the mode indicators in daylight. You'll find yourself checking status on the dashboard just to be sure. Even on the doors, the design and the metals are quite nice, but the upper plastics are unusually hard. So in short, it's a whole lot of wow mixed with a bit of meh. Speaking of wow, the latest Audi MMI system is class-leading. It's nicely integrated into the dash, and it features a clear and easy-to-understand menu system with a responsive touch interface. The optional premium Bang & Olufsen sound system bays the cabin with sound. We'll come back to the MMI, but first, let's talk safety. The blind spot warning indicators are my favorite, integrated into the mirror casings. You also get collision mitigation with Audi pre-sense, automatic headlights, and a driver assistance system. Switch into reverse for a backup camera with rear cross-traffic alerts and parking sensor noises, but no reverse auto-braking. The virtual cockpit seamlessly integrates the built-in maps and directions. You can search for locations by typing, scribbling with your fingers, or simply speaking. Navigate to the nearest Starbucks. Searching for Starbucks nearby. You can now choose a line number or provide additional search terms. Line number two. Should I start route guidance to Starbucks now? If you prefer to use your mobile device, the Q3 supports wireless charging as well as wireless CarPlay. Syncing is easy, and the whole system works much better than the BMW setup. Of course, it also supports Android Auto. Like all other Audis, the Q3 has several drive modes, but here it really doesn't do much. Steering weight is adjustable, the transmission changes shift points, and traction control also is adjusted, but none of it is really noticeable in regular driving. Let's see how these various modes affect a launch on gravel. Here we are in comfort with traction on. The result is pretty uneventful. Next, dynamic with traction on. It appears there's a little bit more power to the back. Finally, dynamic with traction off. Not much of a difference. Let's compare that last run against the BMW X1. As throttles applied, you can see the BMW does allow for more wheel spin. But take a look at the suspension on the Audi. The gap among the front wheels is way higher. This indicates that the Audi suspension is a lot softer. Should make it vastly better for the rough conditions we'll be facing shortly. This car is so incredibly smooth. Now, granted, you could say that suspension is on the soft side for around town. And yeah, I would agree to that. But that should pay dividends when we finally take this off-road a little bit later. Throttle, power out of that turbocharged four-cylinder is pretty good for the class. It's really easy to drive quick in this car just because it is so incredibly smooth. The steering feel is a little light. But, you know, it's pretty good for the class. Again, crossover, not a sports car. Need to get that through my head. Okay, let's go ahead and set up and do 0-60. Line up here and complete stop. Three, two, one, and go. Acceleration comes on quick. It really picks up after 4500 RPM, 50 and 60. You know, that's plenty brisk for this class of car. This isn't a car that you need to be able to be like thrust back in your seat with power. But, you know, you want to be able to get up to speed quickly. And as far as that is concerned, this vehicle does great. With other car makers now including lane tracing and adaptive cruise control standard, you'd probably think that Audi would put its best tech foot forward. But, you'd be wrong. Yeah, it's just regular cruise control. I hit go here. I set my speed. And it does have lane detection and collision mitigation. Those are both good things. However, it won't pace the vehicle in front of me. If I set my speed too fast, I'll just run into the car in front of me. Also, it'll tap me into the lane, but it does not really auto drive. It doesn't do lane tracing like you would find in a Hyundai or even a Subaru. Especially at this price point. That's a little disappointing. A more advanced cruise control system is available on the top trim Prestige model. That adds $3,000 to this already pricey little car. So is that worth it to you? Well, that's up for you to decide, of course. This is so quiet and so comfortable on the freeway. I could easily drive like across the US in this thing. But you can't always say that about a small crossover. So that's a definite win for the Audi here. OK, now let's go ahead and pull off and see how well this does when the road gets a little slipperier. And I don't know if we're going to find snow today. We never pre-dried these things because in the Pacific Northwest, the weather conditions and the road conditions can change daily. So I have not pre-driven this road. We're just going to drive up it and see what we can find. OK, last time I was here, this was covered in ice. Clearly, it is not today. It's actually pretty balmy compared to the weather lately. We're looking at 42 degrees. Now I'm just driving it. Let's go ahead and change the drive select to off-road. Now you can get this with 20-inch wheels. I'm glad I didn't because that would make these roads very challenging. Instead, we got 19-inch. These are Goodyear All Seasons. And they're going to be probably what most people would end up driving on a road like this. This road is getting pretty rugged after it's getting beat up by all the snow. Well, the tree is gone. OK, let's try a little throttle into the corner on the gravel road, see what it does. This is with traction control on. I get a little bit of slip there, but it does kind of clamp down on the fun, which is kind of expected. OK, now we're heading into the climb. This is just a rough road. Sometimes it's covered in snow, but not today. It looks like we got a lot of branches and trees down just because of the recent storms. Traction control is off. Let's see what we can do as far as getting that back out. A little pendulum, kind of up. Yeah, it does allow for a little rotation there. That's nice. Just a little bit, though. They never allow you to really completely deactivate the systems on these modern cars, unless it's a specialty vehicle, of course. Up we go. Yeah, no snow yet. Yeah, it looks like we'll be able to take this up to the rock climb. First little leg. This is going to be a little steep. Now, even though these are the smaller 19-inch wheels, we still have to be careful with hitting rocks too briskly. Oh, we're already working that. Now, this little Q3 does have 8.3 inches of ground clearance, which is good for the class. Not quite as good as a Subaru Forester. Definitely not as bad as even a Tiguan. The Tiguan only had 7.9 inches of ground clearance. Okay, and yep, it looks like the rock climb is here and ready to go. So, let's see how well this does. So, with the car in regular drive, I'm toggling drive select to off-road. There we go. Actually, I'm really impressed at how slow this vehicle can go. I am crawling legitimately at about one to two miles per hour. That's step number one for off-roading is be able to have low speed under control. This is doing good. There is no front camera on this model. So, I seem to have the back camera on for no reason. So, I'll go ahead and turn that off because it's just distracting. Of course, this vehicle has open differentials in the front and the back. Basically, what it does is use wheel braking to help redistribute torque around the system. And yes, that is the layman description of what it's doing. I know it's way more technical than that, but that's what we're going with. Basically, when a wheel spins, we'll be looking on the outside for brakes applying to that wheel, which then helps torque get redistributed to the opposite one. And that should work both for the front and for the back. Now, earlier versions of Haldex relied on hydraulics. So, basically, the wheel had to spin a lot to build up pressure to redistribute the power. Now, it uses a computer system to predict when that might happen and send it much quicker. Wow, plow right through it like it was nothing. Oh, making quick work of it. Nicely done. Now, we'd have to be careful because this only has 8.3 inches of ground clearance, which is not a lot. There's a bit of a bowl here that we have to watch out for. Make sure not to scrape the front. Those are parking sonars going off because the rocks are getting close. But so far, no scraping. Wow, really good so far. Now, the final leg. Here, we're going to lift the back rear tire and see how well that power transmits. Just going to keep the throttle down. No problem. Wow, really impressed with this Audi Q3. Even though it doesn't look like it's really that much of a badass off-road, it kind of is. What if we could find something more challenging? Now, this is a very short little jaunt that also has a lot of different level changes between the right and the left tires. That means that we should be able to remove grip from two tires altogether, which should really challenge this all-wheel drive system. And hopefully, no scraping. Okay, now we should have almost two wheels lifted about here. And I'm just going to keep the throttle down and see if power can go to those other two wheels. Yes! This system just continues to impress. And keep in mind, this is with all-season radials. Come on, you got this. You got this. Oh, yeah. Ha! And the last part is going to be the trickiest, as there's a huge hole on the right. Come on. Oh! You got this. Come on, come on. Can you do it? I'm just keeping the power on. Oh, it did it! Nice! Hey, let's see where this goes. One thing for certain, we are using all 8.3 inches of ground clearance. Now, I could turn off the parking sonars, but I'm leaving them on because they seem to only go off when I get very close to scraping. So it's kind of like a pre-scrape alarm. Doesn't mean I'm necessarily going to hit, because I haven't hit yet. But it's definitely giving me warning as it gets that super close proximity. I don't know where I'm going. I've never been down this road. Later in the season, this road will be completely overgrown with all the brush growing in from the sides. And manufacturers hate it when they have to have their cars detailed after I film them. So it was kind of a nice surprise that this was, for the first time, not only available to drive up because of undergrowth being dying back, but also the snow has melted back. And I am climbing, and I am starting to get little spots of snow. What I'm really hoping is that we'll get enough snow to be able to see how the all-wheel drive system really deals with that kind of surface. OK, looks like the snow is definitely going to get deeper right here. I just want to kind of get my toes wet in it. I'm not going to go extra deep because I don't have any serious extraction gear with me. I do have a shovel and, you know, all the basics just in case. Ooh, it actually looks like it gets very deep very quick. Though we have grip on the sides, I bet I'm going to start scraping before I even get snow under the tires. Let's see. So far, so good. We're right at 8.3 inches, I think. This may be a bad idea. It's pretty, though. Oh, we're having grip issues. And this track is getting... And I'm bottomed out. OK, well, I bottomed out before... I'm turning that off. I bottomed out, unfortunately, before I had a chance to really get much snow under the tires. So I think that is it on this part of the adventure. I wasn't able to find any snow that we could play in. Unfortunately, the snow that I did find, the tracks were too deep, but I'm high centering even before I get snow under the tires. But that's OK. I think we learned a lot today. This all-wheel drive system is fantastic. Yes, it's based on the Haldex system, but it really is quite capable, just like we saw in the Tiguan, which also uses a similar system. It really does a good job on inclines in real-world situations. So yeah, Audi Q3, very impressed. For Driving Sports TV, I'm Ryan Douthit. Thanks for watching. Please be sure to subscribe. Also, post a comment. Tell us what you think. Would you get this car, or would you get something else for the... How much was this? $43,890. What would you buy? Post a comment below. I don't know what I have coming up next week, but I'm sure it'll be something interesting. So we'll see you then. I've got to back down this mountain. Ah, backup camera. Those are so awesome. Scrape, scrape, scrape. Hill descent works backwards as well as forwards. My foot is not on the gas, and we're creeping at, right now, one mile per hour in reverse. Nice.