Audi A8L 6.0 W12 Quattro Tiptronic Full Review,Start Up, Engine, and In Depth Tour

When estate agents take photographs of a house they're selling, they almost always get the vendor to move his car out of shot.

Thumb through the advertisements at the front of Country Life and it's as though you've moved back 200 years. The houses have wisteria and sunshine but the drives are empty, and that's a pity because the car parked outside tells us so much more than the truncated estate agents' descriptions.

You'd go to see a house described as having 6 bdrms, gch, gge, 999-yr lse, 2 pdcks and a lk. But you wouldn't bother if there was a BMW X5 with 20in wheels parked outside. Because then you'd know it had baggy-knicker curtains, lots of chintz, several football-trophy cabinets and that all the taps would be in the shape of swans.

Two weeks ago the Home section of this newspaper ran a picture of Jim Davidson's agreeable house in Surrey. You could tell it was Jim Davidson's house because parked right outside the front door was a royal blue Bentley Arnage.

In some ways, having a Bentley Arnage in the picture is a good thing. It shows the vendor is not worried about looking after the pennies. Which means the lead on the roof will have been applied with a ladle, and that the sash windows won't rattle.

The colour, though — that was the giveaway at Jim's gaff. Green or fawn would have been fine, but blue suggests the owner has little sense of tradition, which in turn means lots of zebra-skin rugs, mingling with endless maroon drapes. Sure enough, close inspection of the interior shots revealed this to be the case.

I would never buy a house from someone with a 1998 Renault Mégane either. Anyone who drives such a thing has no imagination, which means the walls of his house will be magnolia and there will be an avocado bathroom suite. The garden will need work, too, unless you like lots of flowerbeds filled with municipal pansies.

Nor would I drive very far to see a house with a Porsche Boxster parked outside. A Boxster suggests a single man, which means the house will be completely empty except for a huge plasma-screen television and an even more enormous fridge. The only chair will be a black La-Z-Boy with buttons in the armrest. And there will be many "self-improvement" and "management made easy" books by the futon.

I would, however, be interested if the vendor had an Audi, especially if it were an A8. A car like this means the owner has deliberately not bought a BMW, which suggests he does not play golf, which in turn means he does have some taste. It also means he is an architect or a designer of some kind, so he knows what he's doing with the flooring and so on.

Audi is trying very hard at the moment to change all this. The company ensures that a fleet of 50 A8s is on hand to move celebrities around London whenever there's a big premiere or a party, and as a result its public relations man is in Hello! and OK! more often than the Duchess of York.

Happily, however, the ruse doesn't seem to be working. Jordan may be ferried to the opening of Armani and Gabbani's new shop in the back of an A8, but as soon as she's inside she'll make a beeline for someone with an X5. The gormless oaf she's hanging around with at the moment — the one from the jungle, who has a waxed chest — you just know that he's a Beemer kind of guy.Audi, then, is still more Victorian England than Victoria Beckham. I can see David Dimbleby in an Audi, whereas, even if I stand on my head, I cannot see Jim Davidson in one. Annoyingly, however, the A8 has never been a very good car.

For proof that Audis are average cars, driven and made by jolly nice people, you need look no further than the press blurb for the new long-wheelbase 6 litre W12 A8.

Helpfully, the Audi PR department has produced a series of charts comparing its new car with rival offerings from Mercedes and BMW. From these we can establish very quickly that the new A8 is beaten soundly by the Merc S600 when it comes to power and speed, and handsomely by the BMW on the fuel economy front.

Much is made of Audi's decision to make its A8 from lightweight aluminium, but in the interests of fairness and balance a whole page is taken up with a bar chart showing that in the all-important area of power-to-weight the new car loses once again to the Mercedes.

Money? Well, at £75,775 the Audi is £4,000 less than the BMW and undercuts the Merc by a whopping £16,000. But don't worry, Audi points out that a fully loaded version of its car would cost £115,000. So the message from Audi itself is that the new A8 is more expensive, less powerful, not as fast, and quite a bit more thirsty than its main rivals.

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