Text: Sergey Tokarev AUDI MIDDLE EAST AUTO DEALER ORGANIZED A MEDIA TRIP TO OMAN WHERE JOURNALISTS COULD TEST THE ABSOLUTELY NEW AUDI Q7 MODEL IN A FURTHER CLOSE TO THE MAXIMUM CLOSE TO THE BATTLE.
The mountainous landscape of Oman, with its stony canyons, dried up mountain river channels and serpentines of roads, is the best suited for testing the strength of a car that claims to be the honorary title of crossover.
For a test drive from Dubai to Oman, cars were fitted in the “charged” versions of Sport and Comfort with an S-Line body kit. For those who are poorly versed in cars, it is very difficult to understand what the difference is. Inside, the main differences are in the sports steering wheel and in the "sports" front seats. Why "sports" in quotation marks, you ask? Because if these seats were shown to me not in two adjacent cars, but separately, then I would have thought that they are the same. By the way, later on one of the sites I read that the Audi Q7 can be equipped with sports seats of two varieties - "just sports" and "sports S-Line".
Representatives of the Audi brand, who accompanied us throughout the trip, emphasized several important, from their point of view, innovations. First of all, they turned our attention to the steered rear suspension - the rear wheels of the Audi Q7 can now rotate both synchronously with the front and the opposite side. The second thing Audi is proud of is the increase in interior space. While the external geometric dimensions were reduced, the internal ones, on the contrary, increased.
Fans of German automakers do not need to talk about how the Audi Q7, Volkswagen Touareg and Porsche Cayenne are produced on the same base, and the Audi Q7 was the first car to receive a completely updated MLB platform. The manufacturer does not disclose all the details, but a whole bunch of innovations and the use of aluminum instead of steel made it possible to make the new platform immediately 325 kilograms lighter.
Third - a completely new digital dashboard. And this is not just a display of standard devices, but also windows with additional information. At the same time, the instrument cockpit is completely independent of the central display, which after starting the engine creeps out in front of the windshield. By the way, there can be two more displays in the cabin (optional) - they are mounted on the back of the head restraints of the front seats and can be easily removed, turning into tablets familiar to everyone. Inside these Audi tablets with a screen diagonal of 10.1 inches there are NVIDIA Tegra-4 processors, which should, according to company representatives, provide more than sufficient performance and high reliability.
Fourth, some of the top modifications of the car can be equipped with a Bang & Olufsen speaker system specially developed for the Audi Q7. Well, now about the trip itself - with the mountains and canyons, the organizers did not deceive us. On a sunny autumn day we sat down in cars, left the hospitable Shangri-La Barr Al Jissah Resort and Spa and moved in a friendly column to the southeast. Since there were two people in each car, the organizers divided the route into three sections - on the first two (city streets and rocky canyons of dried rivers) the first driver drove the car, and on the third (mountain serpentine) - the second participant. On the way back, accordingly, the roles changed.
Actually, I can’t say anything about the first section - the city traffic in Muscat differs little in density from Dubai, the car behaved absolutely standardly and predictably. The first five minutes of the movement, my partner and I tried to figure out how the automatic distance keeping system works - we were told about it before the trip. Unfortunately, all efforts turned out to be in vain - we did not succeed. As it turned out later, it couldn’t work out, because this option was not in our cars.
The real adventure began in the second section - the organizers successfully picked it up and the off-road qualities of the Audi Q7 proved to be the best. Before moving off the asphalt of the road to the rocky bottom of the dried up bed of a mountain river, we had a separate briefing, helped to turn on all the “off-road” and “mountain” options correctly, increased the clearance, turned on the speed-holding system when descending from the mountain, and only after that we set off. Well, what can I say - a little more than a half-hour trip on real off-road brought exceptionally positive emotions! Forgive me, real fans of extreme sports, but I love comfort, and the car was in perfect harmony with my inner world - I behaved very obediently and moved exceptionally elegantly.
Before we even got tired (we drove a little over 40 minutes along the canyon), we again went on an asphalt serpentine, and my partner took the place at the wheel, which gave me a chance to take a closer look at the numerous buttons and handles, as well as dig into the menu of the control center (MMI ® Navigation plus). I tried to find the function that I read about before the trip - visualization of the route using satellite maps from Google. And, unfortunately, I did not find it. Maybe somewhere deeply hidden, or maybe it was inactive when there was no car connection to the Internet - the cars were emirate, but we rode in Oman. However, I was not very upset - most of the functions described on the sites are still unlikely to be available in the United Arab Emirates - the search for gas stations with the cheapest price or, for example, free parking spaces. Concluding the review, I’ll write about some of the “chips” that the owners of the brand new Audi Q7 will definitely like.
Opening the trunk with your foot. You do not need to kick the car, just hold your foot under the rear bumper. The ability to fully synchronize with your phone using Google Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.
A warning signal when the door is opened in case of interference (such as a car) on the left. They say that cars delivered to the European market are “stuffed” even better, but even these options, it seems to me, should be enough to rank the Audi Q7 among the most equipped crossovers.
CROSSOVER CUV, Crossover Utility Vehicle - off-road vehicle
Combining the qualities of an SUV, an all-terrain vehicle, but also having the disadvantages and advantages of other classes of cars, mainly station wagons, hatchbacks and minivans.
This class of cars is often built on the same platform with conventional passenger cars.
PRICES IN THE UAE ON AUDI Q7 DIFFERENT PACKAGES:
Base: from 275 thousand dirhams
Sport: from 299 thousand dirhams
Design: from 325 thousand dirhams
