Audi A7 Sport BackExecutive SE 3.0 TDI quattro Automatic

Few owners would choose an A7 Sportback as their sole means of transport; so, with no long trips being undertaken over the Christmas and New Year period, the car has sat in the driveway a few times whilst alternative transport has been used for some very short trips to the local shops. It's a fairly bulky car to position safely in a busy car park, if you want to avoid some clumsy parker giving the fine bodywork a ding, which offers a good reason to choose something smaller for such trips. That said, even with the substantial mass of its 3.0-litre V6 engine, cold start warm-up is surprisingly swift, and evidently the result of considerable design effort. The new crankcase and newly designed cylinder heads now have separate coolant loops, and the innovative thermal management system of the new engine also significantly improves the fuel efficiency by 13 per cent over its predecessor.

The recent winter weather has not been conducive to achieving high mpg figures, but nevertheless 25- to 30-mile round trips have usually been covered at around 40mpg, which to my mind is fine economy from a 3.0-litre V6 engine.

I have been using the manual override on the S tronic transmission, using the steering wheel paddleshifts, rather more often recently. I'm not convinced that on a light throttle having the engine in sixth gear at 40mph and spinning at little over 1,000rpm (as in Audi Drive Select Efficiency setting E) is necessarily a good thing, particularly if the engine is still cold, so I've been slotting it down a gear or two at times, which doesn't seem to affect fuel economy very much, and must make for a somewhat quicker warm-up. This is not quite the same effect as one might achieve in the Sport setting, where the speeds held in the gears are rather too much at the other extreme. Generally there's such adequate performance available that you just don't need to paddle the A7 along unless you seek maximum acceleration, and for swift overtaking, you can always paddle select a lower gear when still in D that will be held for 15 seconds or so, after which the automatic gear selection is then resumed.

My exploration of the owner's manual has continued over the past month, and I made my first automated check of the engine oil level using the MMI (multi-media interface) system, which proved to be quite satisfactory. It's actually not too long-winded, although it needs to be done with the engine hot, not cold, and probably better after a nice good run, which is often not a very convenient time if you want to get into the house and shut the car away. It’ll probably be one of those things that you’ll remember you need to do just as you walk through the door, and you’ll promise to do next time around. Build it into a weekly routine, along with checking the condition of the tyres and the washer levels, and it’ll soon become second nature.