The New Audi A6 Is A Screen-Filled Tech Feast For Modern Business

As you were probably expecting, following the leak yesterday, the Audi A6 has been unveiled in full ahead of its official bow at the Geneva Motor Show next week.

The sleek but entirely familiar-looking thing has a few extra muscles here and there, and it’s better for them, but it won’t snap your head around when you first see one go past. Instead, it majors on technology. For starters, it’s almost five metres long, but clever four-wheel steering means it’s nimbler than it looks.

The rear wheels can turn as much as five degrees in the opposite direction to the fronts at low speed, knocking the corporate leviathan’s turning circle down to 11.1 metres. That’s less of an improvement over the current 11.9-metre figure than we’d have expected.

From launch there are two engine options. A 3.0-litre TFSI V6 petrol with 335bhp and 369lb ft of grunt fires the A6 to 62mph in 5.1 seconds, with the limited 155mph top speed a “mere technicality,” according to the press release.

There’s also a diesel. The 3.0-litre V6 TDI has 282bhp, 457lb ft and can, says Audi, return as much as 42.8mpg. It gets an eight-cog Tiptronic torque-converter transmission with a traditional all-wheel drive Quattro drivetrain, where the petrol uses a seven-speed twin-clutch S tronic setup with four-wheel drive on demand.

Both engines – and all the others to come hereafter – will have mild hybrid assistance. A belt alternator-starter (BAS) combines with a lithium-ion battery to make starts smoother and faster, and to allow engine-off ‘coasting’ between 34mph and 99mph. It makes for a better engine stop-start experience, too, and reduces fuel consumption significantly – theoretically, at least.

The A6 is something of a mainstream standard-bearer for Audi; it represents the best of what it can bring to the executive masses. Naturally that hasn’t changed a bit. The fully-digital MMI interface now lets users drag and drop the various readouts to where they want them on the screen in the same way that a smartphone does.

It’s screen central in there. There are two display screens on the centre console, one above the other, plus the 12.3-inch widescreen digital instrument cluster. You can even add another with the ‘Audi Connect Key,’ which allows a smartphone to unlock/lock the car and start the engine. The optional Parking Pilot and Garage Pilot will let the car self-drive its way into and out of parking spaces, and likewise with a garage. It’s not quite the James Bond automated 7 Series gadget from Tomorrow Never Dies, but it’s getting there…