For instance, the RS6's sleek interior touchscreens on the center stack (a 10.1-inch upper display and an 8.6-inch lower one) look minimalist, which is appropriate since they're minimally functional. The RS6 drawbacks, such as they are, tend to fall into the category of self-owns. The RS6 Avant's sound like Lord Gorg just exited the airlock of his starship to announce an important revision to the food chain and your new position therein. You can, of course, make the exhaust louder by selecting either of the RS modes, but in this car, the rumble out back is always rivaled by the soundtrack from the intake. The RS modes (two of them, in ascending order of depravity) are customizable, but both of them sharpen the Avant's responses and generally serve to amplify the fun, even jacking up the idle so the car feels like it's straining the leash when it's stopped. The RS6 Avant can pretend it's reasonable family transportation if you relax the adaptive suspension and ignore the button on the steering wheel labeled "RS Mode." But that's a difficult button to ignore. It feels plenty grippy when you're bombing down your favorite off-ramp. Again, don't get too obsessed with the at-the-limit numbers (in this case, a middling 0.94 g on the skidpad). The RS6 Avant is the unlikely 5031-pound car that can dance. Add some throttle with your steering lock-which in a nose-heavy all-wheel-drive car would normally result in tragic understeer-and the rear end will start to swing wide while the front holds the line. The rear sport differential can send almost all the torque to one side or the other, collaborating with the rear steering to endow the big Audi with instant turn-in. But in practice, the RS6 feels perfectly balanced and even a little tail-happy thanks to the magic of torque vectoring and four-wheel steering. Like many of Audi's RS forebears, the RS6 is seemingly handicapped by a front-loaded weight bias, that V-8 overbite saddling the nose with 55.0 percent of the car's heft. The Avant isn't just a drag-strip specialist, though. But thanks to left-digit bias, the RS6 Avant puts us in the unusual position of apologizing for numbers that should require no apologies. Instead, we're like, "Yeah, about what we expected." Can you really even feel the difference between a 2.9-second and 3.1-second run? Sure, to the same extent you notice that five-cent difference in the pretax price of ShamWows and a $20 bill, which is to say barely at all. If that time were two-tenths of a second quicker, we'd be petitioning for National RS6 Day, a time to celebrate and reflect on the RS6's righteous and scarcely believable acceleration. This is why the 2021 Audi RS6 Avant's certifiably ballistic 60-mph time of 3.1 seconds seems, in a bizarre way, mundane. We focus on that first digit and assign it undeserved importance because our cave-dweller brains are easily tricked. Įver hear of left-digit bias? It's the reason ShamWows cost $19.95 instead of $20 and why people say they're 39 instead of 40. From the December 2020 issue of Car and Driver.
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