2017 Audi A4 Allroad

Want an avant? This family hauler is like it but taller.

- James Tate

Whether you’re a backpacking business person, a PTA parent with an off-road wild side, or just braving the perpetual winter of the northern Great Plains states, the 2017 Audi A4 Allroad seeks to be your luxury transport of choice. Lifted slightly higher than its sedan counterpart and featuring stark wheel arches, roof rails, and a vertical-slat single-frame grille, the look has “ready to tackle the trail” written all over it. That’s nothing new for an Allroad, though—its new “quattro with ultra technology” is.

No, the fancy name doesn’t mean that Audi is attempting to repackage its hallmark all-wheel drive around some new buzzwords. This is an entirely new setup, which in the name of efficiency dumps the vaunted center differential in exchange for a predictive on-demand system. It won’t scroll next week’s winning lottery numbers across the heads-up display, but like other predictive systems, it’ll take driver inputs and surface conditions into account—every 10 milliseconds in this case. Rather than simply reacting to slippage, it uses an algorithm to derive when slippage is likely, based on the info it collects. Hence the surely a marketing term, “predictive.”

If you’re instinctively pissed that Audi went to an on-demand system, know that this one is quite a ways more advanced than the Haldex setup in your TT. It can switch to all-wheel drive in just 2/10 ths of a second, often before it’s actually needed, and it starts in all-wheel drive every time, disengaging it as soon as it’s not necessary to save up to five percent at the pump.