A3 Turbo Is Two Cars In One
The Sunday Age
Sunday February 8, 1998
Add the word "turbo" to a car's badge, and what are the images conjured up? Power, certainly, as well as speed, and not a few connotations of motor sport. For a fairly uncomplicated engine component, the turbo has developed quite a bad-boy image. Car insurers hate them - or perhaps love them, given the punitive premiums imposed on turbocharged cars - while for the petrol head, there's the promise of bulk horsepower and tyre shredding acceleration.
Yet here's a conundrum. At the launch of the Audi A3 Turbo last week, its makers were talking about the car's flexible nature, its sophistication and its low fuel consumption. Yes, they admitted it was "lightning fast", but it seemed it was the A3 1.8T's green credentials that were just as important as its speed potential.
Official fuel consumption figures for the 1.8T are actually lower than for the less powerful, naturally aspirated version, which in almost every way is an identical car, give or take a few tweaks. Audi's figures say the 1.8T accelerates to 100 kmh 1.5 seconds faster than the standard car, and yet around town consumes 8.5 l/100 km instead of 9.0. This is one of the few occasions when motorists can not only have their cake, but eat it.
Without getting too technical, engines like that in the A3 1.8T are happening because car makers have found that under the right conditions a turbocharger can increase an engine's efficiency instead of simply injecting a horsepower fix.
A turbocharger is a kind of compressor driven by an engine's exhaust gases (thus harnessing energy that normally disappears out the tail pipe) and which delivers a boosted amount of air into the engine's combustion chambers.
If that boost amounts to a little instead of a lot, then the car's engine has the combined bonuses of small-capacity fuel consumption, but with a bigger than normal power delivery to improve overtaking on country roads, or making travel around town more enjoyable.
Such engines are being called light pressure turbos, and seem to be catching on mainly among European manufacturers. Good examples are the Audi A4 1.8T (which virtually donates its power-plant to the A3), Saab's 9-5 luxury sedan, and Volvo's S70 2.5T.
The new Audi A3 1.8T is a hot hatch of sorts, although nowhere in Audi's literature will you find such a phrase. That's not to say it's slow: it will accelerate from 0-100 kmh in 8.1 seconds, but its manufacturer stresses the amount of low-down torque the engine delivers to aid its flexibility.
The 1.8-litre, five-valves per-cylinder engine produces 110 kW of power, but more importantly, the peak torque figure of 210 Nm is delivered from just 1750 rpm and doesn't slacken until 4600 rpm. Such relaxed and accessible performance is the key to the car's low fuel consumption: instead of using lots of revs and big throttle openings, the driver can cruise through the gears and still keep up with - or well ahead of - other traffic.
Matthias Seidl, the managing director of Audi importer Astre German Automotive, explains that it's really up to the driver whether he wants to achieve maximum fuel economy or maximum performance from the A3 Turbo.
"In view of (its) excellent torque characteristic, driving style will normally be the main factor determining the Audi A3 1.8T's fuel consumption," he says.
"If the driver uses low to medium engine speeds, the emphasis is on fuel economy. Maximum performance, however, can still be obtained by allowing the engine to rev more freely in the lower gears."
The engine owes its Jekyll and Hyde nature just as much to modern computing power, with a Bosch Motronic engine management system carefully balancing fuel delivery to sequential fuel injection and monitoring levels of boost to a smaller than normal turbocharger.
By delivering more pulling power low in its rev range, the turbocharged engine answers one criticism of other A3 models, that while the non-turbo 1.8-litre engine was powerful enough, most of its performance was delivered high in the rev range.
That may make it suitable for typical European driving conditions, such as flat-out motorway cruising, but somewhat less so for slower Australian drivers, not to mention our penchant for power-sapping automatic transmissions in prestige cars. Although the turbocharged A3 might work better with an auto, the 200 or so examples Audi expects to sell in Australia this year will be available only with a five-speed manual transmission.
At $46,000, the A3 1.8T is about $6000 more expensive than the non-turbo 1.8 version, but it is more than the engine that has changed. The car itself is still a three-door hatch, but the suspension has been stiffened and lowered by 20 mm to give more responsive and safer handling as well as to give it a low-slung, sporty look.
Low-profile tyres are fitted to six-spoke alloy wheels, and inside there's a three-spoke sports steering wheel and even a leather wrapped gear knob to confirm the 1.8T's quicker-than-average aspirations.
Other equipment includes anti-lock brakes, twin full-sized airbags, central locking, climate control air-conditioning and a steering wheel adjustable for rake and reach.
© 1998 The Sunday Age
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