 2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
Article and photos by Steven Bochenek
It was one of the most fun vacations the missus and I had in years because we hadn’t built it up. Quick, with no once-in-a-lifetime experiences to boast about on Facebook, it was just a few fun days visiting friends, trying new experiences in beautiful surroundings.
Each day there were dozens of surprises and thrills. Many were courtesy of the Audi A8 TDI. Favoured by bank presidents and diplomats, it made the mega-highways and ugly traffic tolerable, and the interesting roads an absolute thrill.
Day 1 – The Relaxing Trip to Lake Memphremagog
We picked the A8 up at 11am on Thursday, August 1 from Audi Canada’s head office in Whitby, Ontario. As seems to happen every year, I was suddenly crazy-busy with work just when leaving. A client needed something done right away. So my wife drove the first leg to Kingston, Ontario while I typed on my lap.
 2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
Our destination was a friend’s cottage on Lake Memphremagog. It’s in Quebec’s eastern townships and is easier to say than it looks. The ride was deliciously comfortable, provided by the A8’s adaptive air suspension. But here in the passenger’s seat for once, there was also an opportunity to futz with the controls more.
For a mere $3,500 extra, you can add the Comfort Seat Package. Do it! It includes ventilation for cooling and heating, which is great, and front seats adjustable in a humbling twenty-two different ways. That was a treat for the back – but the pneumatic massage function was more like a four-course meal.
Yes, massage.
You choose where the seat-masseuse focuses: Shoulder or Lumbar; or get the entire back with Stretch, Pulse and Wave settings. The massaging stops automatically after a few minutes. Sensible. You don’t want some blissed-out driver drifting off to sleep. But having sustained a back injury recently, I just kept putting it back on. (Two days earlier, I’d experienced the exceptionally comfortable V-shaped seats in the 2013 Lincoln MKZ Hybrid and raved about them. These trumped the experience.) A decent massage costs at least $75 per hour [we’re not expensing that! – Ed.]. Another week in the A8 and this package would have paid itself off in spa bills.
   2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
By Kingston, we’d come 200 km in the A8 and achieved an impressive 6.3 L/100km. Its Energuide highway stats are 5.4 (8.7 in the city) but government tests are always unrealistic. Make no mistake: 6.3 is excellent for a zaftig power sedan. The moral? Test-drive a diesel if you’re looking for a car. Times have changed.
After lunch, I took the wheel. A hellish gale moved in and accompanied us east for the rest of the day. (It was forecast to rain each day of our getaway but we managed to continually cheat the weather, luckily timing rain with drives or sleeps.) At times rain was so heavy we couldn’t clearly see the vehicle ahead. However, riding on 20-inch wheels with Pirelli performance tires that clung like a neurotic girlfriend after you’ve won the lottery, I never felt the least bit unsafe. Plus, the A8 has adaptive cruise control, which keeps a respectable distance away from it, visible or not. It works from 0 to 250 km/h – not that I tested either extreme. An extra, it came as part of the $2,500 Driver Assistant Package, with lane assist and pre-sense plus.
  2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
No longer driving, my wife luxuriated in the massage and became the DJ, parking us on Sirius’s Classic Vinyl which chugged out trippy early ‘70s FM rock: Bowie, Badfinger, Seger and enough Stones to weigh us down so much that, by the end of the day, we’d increased fuel consumption to 6.6 L/100 km over 620 km.
The eastern townships are an Anglo anomaly within la belle province, bordering on Vermont. Getting there used to suck hard but, after eons of construction, the Rive Sud bypass is finally open. By avoiding Montreal, we saved at least two stop-n-stop, white-knuckle hours.
  2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
The aforementioned rise in fuel consumption after lunch came mostly in the last half hour. Our friend’s cottage is south of the town of Magog, about a half hour from the main autoroute. On real highways, cruise control and regular drive were sensible. The final 30 km were pure play with hilly c- and s-bends galore – and the rain miraculously stopped.
I slid the lid of the armrest, creating elbowroom for sportier steering. Now in sport mode, paddle-shifting the eight-speed transmission (though we didn’t get near eighth gear) and letting the 3.0L diesel engine rip, I experienced a whole new vehicle! The A8 is a wolverine in wolf’s clothing. On these rally roads, it was like it had shrunk and intuited the conditions.
  2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
Hello adrenaline!
We arrived at Anna and Norm’s cottage just in time for sundown. The deck was still too wet for dinner outside, but the lake and air were warm. After a quick change, I threw myself into the lake’s weedy warmth, swam for 10 vigorous minutes, then dripped dry. We hadn’t simply gotten here with the Audi A8 TDI. We’d arrived!
Day 2 – Fat Naked Beauty in Mountainous Vermont
One byproduct of the previous day’s storm was detritus flying around the highway. Just before crossing the Quebec border, an aggregate truck dripped a thousand stones onto the cars behind, including ours. The A8’s windshield was chipped, a sensory sin: like a moustache drawn on La Giaconda, a Hollywood starlet with a missing tooth or Sir Paul McCartney singing disco. (Later, a precipitous drop in overnight temperature extended the chip to a foot long crack: heartbreaking.)
I didn’t have wifi but wanted to alert the media contacts at Audi Canada in case they needed me to visit a dealer in Montreal. Well, actually we did have wifi, but I wanted some guy-time in the A8 with Norm. So we drove five kilometres into the nearest town.
Georgeville is arguably the prettiest of the Eastern Townships. It’s been pickled in time by vast money supplied by elite Montrealers who want it kept olde and quainte. Nary a Boston Pizza or Walmart forever.
Norm was a tad fraught by my driving; just the day before he’d hit and killed a fawn – very sad – so I slowed. (This is a good point to talk about Night Vision Assist, an Audi option that uses infrared sight to detect people or deer ahead and alert you with a chime.)
 2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
Later, we took a trip across the border to hike Mount Pisgah (pronounced as distastefully as you’d expect) in Vermont. It’s only a forty-minute drive door-to-door, despite the border check in Stansted, Quebec. This crossing’s easily the continent’s most laid back. Until recently, the twin towns in Quebec and Vermont shared a library, which was only shut down because of paranoid hawks in DC. Locals take great pride in their peaceable ways. It’s been like that since 1814, the last time the two sides were at war. (Note the photo of the 1812 cemetery.)
We didn’t take the A8 because I’d neglected to get permission to drive it over the border. However, Norm’s Golf Wagon TDI offered an interesting comparison. He typically gets 1,100 km to a tank and the car is four years old. We’d do nearly the same during our trip. The comparison ends there.
After a stirring three-hour hike up and down the 849 m mountain, we jumped into Lake Willoughby. This precipitous area is subject to rock slides, so there’s little development and few people. Of those few, lots are beach-loving nudists. Of the nudists, none are the sort you’d spend much time wishing you could see naked.
  2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
Let’s leave it at that.
That night, Georgeville held its annual town dance. A band of 15-year-olds played classic and modern rock hits respectably while their parents got loaded, carrying beer, wine and dope around in the open. Though similar to Ontario in many ways, Quebec is far more relaxed about liquor laws. So, you’d think they’d all be berserk all the time but that mostly happens just when repressed Ontario kids cluster here during reading week and March break.
Day 3 – Bienvenue a Montréal
Ayer’s Cliff is a sleepy hamlet 10 km from Magog that comes alive on Saturday mornings in the summer for one and a half hours when moneyed city dwellers descend on the hippyish farmer’s market. Organic quinoa coffee and handmade free-range breads are ubiquitous. People know each other; most are thoroughly bilingual and quick to flip from one tongue to the next. It’s a charming experiment and a good example not just for all of Quebec, or even all of Canada, but the whole world.
  2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
We bought some lunch supplies for a final repast back at Norm and Anna’s cottage before getting back on the road.
The weather was massively hot and the A8’s pearl black exterior and coal black interior loved soaking up the sun. Fortunately the Valcona leather seats were ventilated.
Unlike Toronto, Montreal hasn’t destroyed all of its beautiful old buildings; just its roads and bridges, which makes driving frustrating. In the summer, there’s always some artsy festival, noisy protest or combination thereof blocking traffic, so you never know when you’ll be stuck for a half hour for no apparent reason. Being in a luxury sedan that’s soundproofed perfection makes it easier to take.
On this trip however we had few problems getting into town. We drove to our friend’s street in leafy Westmount. The A8 looked more at home here than at the lake. It also looked happier here than the narrow, drunk tourist–filled streets of Vieux Montréal where we had dinner. Sexy as it is – with a length of 5.27 m and turning circle of 12.7 m the A8’s a bit big for downtown living, even with overhead-view and reverse cameras; much more suited for drives from uptown to the airport. So we left it and taxied out to become the narrow streets’ drunk tourists ourselves.
  2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
Day 4 – Loud Music and Tens of Thousands of Grooving Kids
When there’s an event on, the only reason you’d want to take a car to Ile Ste. Helene is if you’re Sebastian Vettel. If you’re here for the car only, skip to Day 5. The only action the Audi A8 saw this day were the affectionate strokes I gave it on our way to the Métro (subway) and the Osheaga Festival. This was its third and final day.
Osheaga? This massive collection of concerts at multiple stages featured some of the hottest names in popular music, plus several duds and a few old farts. The vibe and scene is pure Montreal: loads of fun with few heavies. Mostly it was 20-somethings, but the ages ranged from babies to grandparents.
We caught Charles Bradley’s finale. A soul master only recently discovered with the chops and range of Wilson Picket or Sam Moore, Bradley spent all of his adulthood trying to make it and much of it living on the streets. This guy’s voice bleeds and, for me, none of the other acts could touch him. Not that they weren’t great – he was just better.
We saw all the acts we wanted but missed Hannah Georgas, a sweet and melodious Canadian balladeer. The weather had finally, albeit briefly, caught up with us and we huddled beneath the Red Bull tent while six sorts of violent apocalypse rained down amid thunder and lightning – or sturm und drang if you’d like a reason to mention the Audi again.
It cleared within twenty minutes but Hannah was finishing her final chord for the faithful when we got to her stage. But that was the last of rain.
We caught the Lumineers, and before the closing act of Mumford and Sons, New Order. Whining ‘80s Brit New Wave, they haven’t weathered the decades well and gave possibly the longest one-hour concert of our lives.
If you do go to Osheaga, leave early or bring your patience: exiting the island with 80,000 others takes time. Instead of wasting in line, spend a mellow hour hanging out in the wifi chill forest, a treed wonderland gently lit with bendy neon tubes and kids on E. I used to think the Jazz Festival was Montreal’s finest event, but Osheaga just may trump it. (Sorry, race fans: the F1’s a lot of loud fun but rife with douchie troublemakers who’ve been cooped up all winter, seizing the day like a bear with a toothache recently awoken from hibernation.)
    2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
Days 5 & 6 – The Drive Home, Another Diesel Revelation
Apologies: since day 1 the talk’s been more about the travel experiences than the car. That’s because we spent very little time in it compared to the stuff we did. This changed fast.
By this point the A8’s city and combined fuel economy netted 8.5 L/100 km, which is superb. One reason for that is the balanced and ultra-light space frame. The A8’s curb weight is just 2,045 kg and that’s with Quattro, Audi’s term for all-wheel drive. It also makes acceleration easier and cheaper. Yay!
Another reason for that favourable fuel economy? Start/stop technology turns the engine off when you brake completely, then restarts it when you release your foot. (To be fair most Torontonians and Montrealers rarely actually stop even at Stop/Arrêt signs.)
But the biggest reason, simply, is diesel. Consider: the A8’s 3.0L and 4.0L gasoline engines Energuide stats’ are 12.4/13.2 city and 7.6/8.2 highway versus TDI’s 8.7 and 5.4. Today, the cheapest prices in Ontario are $1.119 per litre for gasoline and $1.047 for diesel.
 2014 Audi A8 TDI Road Trip. Click image to enlarge |
Even though diesel’s not always cheaper than gas in winter, whatever extra you pay for the diesel engine will surely pay itself off soon enough (perhaps not if you just lease your car for a couple of years). Europeans, whose gas taxes make ours look modest, have known this for decades. Furthermore diesel cars produce far less greenhouse gas. So you can feel superior to your neighbours.
Ahem: why aren’t we all driving diesels?!
Anyway, we chose to split the drive home over two days. It was holiday Monday in Ontario and the traffic heading back from Montreal moves at a glacial pace on the 401, a deathtrap populated with exhausted sociopaths. We overnighted in Napanee, Ontario (birthplace of Avril Lavigne and temporary home of Sir John A. MacDonald). Normally just over two hours from Montreal, it took more than five this time! Normally, I’d be a seething co-sociopath.
Normally I don’t have an A8.
It’s such a sweet ride that you’re rarely tempted to put it into Sport mode, especially parked on the 401.
However on Day 6, we began with a drive through Prince Edward County before going the final leg back to Audi. This island juts into Lake Ontario, south of Belleville and has become the new Niagara because of its wine and cheese industries – plus tourism sparked by the world-renowned (if obviously named) Sandbanks Provincial Park. The roads are long straights, suddenly interrupted by big, friendly bends with signs everywhere demanding you drive half of what feels right. Luckily it was a weekday, so the roads were empty; the area’s teeming at this time of year, but not at 8 am.
The A8 loved it in Sport mode. For such a significant sedan, the steering is laser keen. And the turns? Poetry in extremely quick motion. It did the entire length of the island, a 90-minute drive, much quicker than planned.
Back on the 401, I milked the cruise control. This is where the A8 seemed happiest on the fuel: luxuriating on long stretches and saving its surprises for tight spots, rather than flaunting its dexterity and power.
Overall it was a great getaway made more memorable by this beautiful power sedan. The distance of our total trip was slightly under 1,600 km. This last leg was 183.7 km and logged in at a consistent 6.5 L/100 km.
Our next car will be a diesel. If we win the lottery, chances are it would be an A8 TDI. Our next home may be Quebec.
| Related articles Test Drive: 2013 Lexus LS 600h L Test Drive: 2012 Mercedes-Benz S 350 Bluetec Diesel Test Drive: 2011 Audi A3 TDI First Drive: 2014 Audi A6 and A7 TDI Manufacturer’s Website Photo Galleries: |
Pricing:
Base 2014 Audi A8 3.0 TDI: $93,900
Options: Top-view camera – $700, LED headlights w High beam assist $2,000
Packages: Sport – $3,300, Driver Assistant –$2,500, Comfort Seat – $3,500
Freight & PDI: $1,995
A/C Tax: $100
Price as Tested: $107,995
Competitors:
Mercedes-Benz S 350 BlueTEC 4MATIC
BMW Active Hybrid 7
Lexus 600h L
