I know some of the board members here have some experience with the Audi S4. I am very seriously considering one as my daily driver and have pretty much been a Honda loyalist for a while and have some concerns in regards to the Audi. I was originally looking at the S4 when I bought my S2000 but bought the S2000. I intend to have the Hoppen chip installed before I pick it up and want to hear some others opinions on the car. Thanks in advance.

 

Chipping ain't that easy, bro. Especially with a bi-turbo car that doesn't have that great of a track record for reliability.

Do a search and you'll find plenty of info about the S4.

 

Are you good friends w/ the service advisor @ your local Audi dealership? I hope so, you'll need all the help you can get!

 

I have a 95 Audi S6 as my daily driver and the S2000 for fun. The audi is chipped with 145,000 miles and is still running strong. In my opinion, the audi S-cars are great daily drivers, but theyre are $$.

 

I'll requote myself from another current thread here in OT:

For the love of God, stay away from the A4! That was the worst car ownership experience I've ever had, and they ended up repurchasing it under the lemon law when it was only 9 months old. The problems were widespread, including total tranny failure, turbo problems, wheel bearing replacement, paint popping off, and air conditioning failure (at 2 days old!).

The car was bad enough, but the way Audi treated us was worse; it took all but a Congressional order to get them to get the car right or get it out of our hands. I will never, ever buy another Audi, ever.

I've heard similar things about the S4, and seeing as they share a lot of the things that went wrong on my A4, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.

 

I will preface my comments by saying this. I think Audi makes some wonderful products. Most of their cars are beautiful inside and out and drive very well.

My best friend has a 2001 A42.8 quattro with sport package. I have two co-workers with three Audis between them. Two A6 2.8's and a A6 TT.

All of them love their cars but hate the dealerships. As I understand the issue, Audi has not built up a sufficient dealership network for their cars.

Sales have skyrocketed and they have added very few new dealerships. The problem is made worse by the corporate decision to pay for maintenance for the first 36K miles. Apparenetly, you have to make an appt. for an oil change and at least in Orange County those appointments can be three weeks out.

Further, when problems have occurred the dealership doesn't stock parts so they must be ordered from Germany and that takes a ton of time and expense.

One of my co-workers decided that he had had enough and passed on buying a new A6 in favor of buying a Lexus purely out of a desire to have a good relationship with the dealerhsip and to be treated like a customer that just plunked down more than 40 large on a new car.

Just food for thought. They all love the cars. It's just that the ownership experience isn't all that it could be. I would think you would want to consider this as the S4 is to be your daily driver.

By the way, I think the S4 Avant is a bad ass all purpose automobile. I just can't see putting that much money into a car and being treated like Audi dealers seem to treat their customers.