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From YourSITE.com Reviews & Road Tests Unfortunately for us, the warmer season is drawing to a close, and the solid days of top-down motoring for those of us without certifiable insanity are getting fewer and fewer. There’s always that guy you see next to you in traffic with the convertible top down in seriously cold weather, and all of a sudden he doesn’t seem like such a nut job anymore when you drive a car like this.
The cavernous feel is especially so at night. The only lighting in the rear is the mood lighting down in the footwells of the back seats. Certainly, mounting lights in the roof of a convertible top would be difficult, though some map lights that activate on entry located on the upper rear passenger door panels would be nice and help in a pinch. Accessing the back seat with the top up is also an exercise in contortion. The front seats will fold forward and controls mounted conveniently by the release on the outward shoulder of the seat will allow you to adjust it fully forward, though ingress and egress is still difficult as the opening is quite small. Of course, these are small complaints. Though certainly a four-passenger car, the S4 Cabriolet is not about practicality in the league of an S4 sedan, much less the Avant. Still, we hope to test this practicality even further in our next report when contributing writer Chris Stewart and his family of four take a November road trip to Pennsylvania in the car. With two children, two child seats and a wife wishing they’d stuck with the minivan, it should make result in extreme conditions for our 4 Seasons S4 Cabriolet.
4 Season Driver’s Log Notes 8,289 Miles Driving the S4 Cabriolet to the inaugural New York Concours d’Elegance is a real pleasure. Knowing the odor of upstate sections of the NJ turnpike, I stop for gas in central Jersey and raise the top, not to put it down again until Manhattan. The 34-Series Avon tires we added last month take Manhattan potholes surprisingly well. It’s trips like this one, destination Central Park, where I begin to swear off any new car without Navigation. This one feature makes driving much less stressful when in cities where you’re somewhat unfamiliar with the geography. There’s no swearing as you try to find yourself on the map, or cursing as you venture off of your Mapquest coursesheet printout. 8,620 Miles Covering Concours events is helping rack up the mileage on our 4 Season S4 Cabriolet. This time we’re off to Northern Virginia for the local Deutsche Marque Concours. The S4 adds to the relatively small Audi owners showing, though it certainly wins friends among the group of BMW, Mercedes and Porsche owners who wander over to the Audi section. The BBS wheels reel them in, and the V8 under the open hood has them asking questions. I overhear a woman standing with her husband admiring the car’s interior. “Now why can’t BMW make one like that?” she asked him.
8903 Miles Today, photos of the new A4 and S4 Cabriolet are first released by Audi. From the looks of it, changes to the body are largely encompassed by a new hood, front fenders, grille and front bumper covers. Taillights appear to be the only change at the rear. The new car doesn’t make the old one look especially dated, but the new grille design is much more aggressive looking, having us wondering how hard it would be to fit the new B&B mono grille kit to our 4 Seasons tester. 9,423 Miles Having no Volvo in the current DC motor pool, we decide to drive the S4 north to cover a Volvo owners’ event in Westchester, PA for sister website Swedespeed.com. Leaving early, I head to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor area to seek out a shoot in the low lighting of early morning. It’s getting colder, but the morning blast to Baltimore with the top down and heat on high is a lot of fun, and it’s probably one of the last warm weekends we’ll have this year. Two out of three shooting locations attract verbal appreciation for the car from passers by. The third location is devoid of people entirely. Later at a meeting for a convoy of Volvo owners, there are a couple jabs at me for driving an Audi in this pro-Swedish group, but respect is given when the hood is lifted and the V8 is shown off. 10,005 Miles There’s a new Mazda MX-5 on loan to the office for a road test planned for sister website TripleZoom.com. The Mazda couldn’t be more of an opposite to the S4. Where the Audi is luxurious and torque-laden, the MX-5 does without sound deadening or a larger engine for the sake of the pure sports car feel. The little MX-5 is fun, but I’m happy to be back in the S4 at week’s end.
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