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Story and Photos by Dubspeed Driven Contributor, Wes Grueninger

On a warm day this April, amid the palm trees and adobe buildings that have been standardized and stamped out like assembly-line sausage patties, a line of Audi Q7s threads its way through morning traffic in Carlsbad, California. The procession comes to a stop fifty miles later, in an overgrown field at the base of a rutted dirt trail on the side of Palomar Mountain. “Be careful,” says an Audi staffer in a black twill shirt. “The road’s muddy from the rain this morning, and if you go over the side there’s nothing to stop you for another 2600 feet until you’re back down here.” He makes sure that the air suspension on the Q7 is set to “lift”, then gives my co-driver and me a wry smile. “Have fun.” I was told there might be some off-roading today.

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Yes, it’s a recurring theme: SUVs, say a large number of people in sandals and flare-leg jeans, guzzle gas. They handle worse than smaller vehicles and are more prone to rollovers. They’re incompatible with cars in side-impact collisions and are responsible for sucker-punching Mother Earth. Winding up a SUV detractor is a lot like cranking up a set of novelty chattering teeth, except the teeth might possibly produce more original criticisms. Getting the sport-utility cynics riled up never ceases to entertain, though; it’s slippery fun. Yet, their voices are gaining traction. Not only that, but gas is over $3 a gallon across much of the country. In choosing this exact moment to be the last to jump into the luxury SUV arena, it would seem that Audi’s logic has ebbed its flow, wouldn’t it?

It would, if the company hadn’t pinned so many of its hopes on the Q7. In addressing a room of journalists who have been flown in to San Diego for the new model’s preview, Audi of America product planner Wolfgang Hoffmann repeats a phrase that we would hear often over the next two days. “This,” he says, “is the most important car for Audi in the United States.” It’s hard not to want to believe him. Speaking in crisp English tinged with a German accent, Hoffmann projects the kind of enthusiasm for his product that, in a perfect world, could be bottled and sold as a cure for depression. Pens scribble softly on notepads. Toes subconsciously tap to a thumping bass line as television commercials are shown. The more jaded journalists sit bolt upright with their arms crossed. Enthusiasm is necessary during these events. The audience is a tough crowd.

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Their cynicism is justified. Audi watched on the sidelines as the SUV market blossomed over the last fifteen years, and the Q7 is their first real entry into an already-crowded marketplace. “Unfortunately, the market itself won’t help us selling this car,” says Hoffmann. “The growth rates we experienced in the nineties. . . are not going to continue.” He then adds, “You have to conquer.”

How many conquests, and where they will come from, Audi isn’t saying. “This car is going to be probably the second or third highest selling Audi,” deflects Executive Vice President Johan de Nysschen. “That’s probably as specific as I’m willing to get with the volumes.” When put on the spot about whose hides the Q7 will be taking sales out of, de Nysschen offers the kind of non-answer that takes avoiding being pinned down to an art form, like a particularly outrageous drag queen foiling the arrest attempts of an entire squad of Keystone Kops. “With this car we have no customer base in the segment at all. So every single transaction is going to be a conquest.”

If the Q7 doesn’t find an audience, it won’t be on account of the hardware. Under the hood of every Q7 is mounted an absolute peach of an engine: a detuned version of the 4.2-liter V8 used in Audi’s RS 4 sedan, which uses direct gasoline injection to achieve 350 horsepower and a torque curve that is level, but not nearly as boring, as Kansas. A V6-powered model with 280 horsepower will be available this fall, which is expected to eventually make up seventy-five percent of Q7 sales. Both engines are mated to a six-speed Tiptronic transmission and Quattro all-wheel-drive system which directs power to the front and rear wheels in a 42:58 split, and can dynamically shift the bias between the two as conditions require. Audi claims that the V8 drivetrain will hand you sixty miles per hour if you give it seven seconds, and continue to an electronically limited 130 – a claim that I may or may not be able to substantiate, depending on the statute of limitations.

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Stopping the 5,300-pound Q7 from those speeds is a task left to its gargantuan brakes. There are some things that are larger in diameter than the front and rear brakes on the Q7 – radio telescope dishes, for instance – but not many. At 13.8 inches for the front rotors and 13 inches for the rear, the brake discs on the big Audi are larger around than a LP record, most woks, 100-year-old oak trees and the average transcontinental oil pipeline. Oil pipelines should be of particular interest to Q7 drivers, since the vehicle holds 26.4 gallons of gas and is rated at only 14 miles per gallon in the city, and an estimated 19 during highway cruising.

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Those parts are bolted to a bespoke platform, a fact that Hoffmann is all too eager to emphasize. “We are not based on the Touareg platform,” he points out. “Please don’t write that the Q7 is based on the Touareg platform, my boss will kill me.” The body structure isn’t the only thing specific to the Q7 – the engine and drivetrain, the electronics and interior fitments are all unique to this model. When tallied, only fifteen percent of components are shared between the Audi and Volkswagen SUVs. There are more parts common between the Volkswagen Phaeton and the Bentley Continental GT. I can assure you, gentle reader, that the Q7 is not a Volkswagen Touareg in an Audi suit. Wolfgang will live to see another day.

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There are fifteen Q7s lined up outside the Four Seasons Aviara the next morning, and six guys with spray bottles and cloth diapers detailing them. “Man,” one of them tells me, “this thing is the *expletive*. All of us are talkin’ *expletive* about our own cars after we’s had to move these things around. Y’know?” He then casts a longing glance at a green Q7 in silence to give the moment its appropriate gravity. He scuffles a filthy sneaker on the ground. *expletive.*

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His reaction is not unique. It’s hard not to be struck by the design of the Q7. It is wide – very wide – and hunkered down on its twenty-inch split-spoke wheels, which seemingly roll into the sidewalls of the tires. The tail lamps and lift gate are faired into the sides of the body to eliminate visible seams from the rear of the car. A slickly integrated rear deflector keeps dirt and snow from accumulating on the rear window. Discreet LED turn signals trace the lower half of the side-view mirrors and the lower fascias. The headlamps are canted inwards towards the waterfall grille, and its face is set in a perpetual, menacing scowl. As Keith Bradsher notes in his book High and Mighty, great pains are taken to give SUVs evocative styling which projects aggression. While GMC recently misstepped with its smiling-bucktooth grille on the new Tahoe, the Audi Q7 gives the distinct impression that it is about to go for the throat. Yes, the Q7 is still a traditional passenger-compartment box stuck to a hood-and-fenders box, but as two-box designs go, it is inscrutably clever.

There are few things that make an automotive journalist’s reprobate heart pump maliciously more than being handed the keys to someone else’s new vehicle to abuse, but the key to the Q7 is handed to me with a caveat. Stick it in your pocket, I am told, and get in the car. The Q7 will detect the key when it is in its perimeter, and unlock the doors when the handles are touched. Once in the car, pressing the “Start Engine” button will bring up the dash lights and turn on the navigation system, then fire the engine up in a smooth ballet of technology.

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The interior, it need not be pointed out, boasts typically fine Audi quality – there’s the expected assortment of leathers and alcantara and hand-polished woods, aluminum and soft-touch plastics. Which is not to say that the Q7’s interior is without its share of quirks. Some things – there is no release lever on the glove box door itself, instead it’s opened by a button mounted high on the instrument panel – are snarky to say the least. Others, such as the instrument binnacles shaped after canned hams, are just improbably kooky.

Seating in our test car was an optional six-passenger layout, with a middle row of two bucket seats and a two-passenger third-row bench that will be found comfortable by only two groups: Five-year-olds and small dogs. Audi claims that the rear seat is designed for passengers up to 5’4” tall, but failed to include a footnote that those same passengers must also have a fetish for contortionism. Optional on the Q7 is a seven-passenger seating system, which replaces the mid-section buckets with a three-across bench, while a five-passenger seating arrangement comes standard.

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Both rear rows of seating fold flat with the cargo area floor, and the headrests automatically tuck away in a slick flip-flip-flip origami motion. To aid in loading, an optional power opening and closing tailgate is available, and its maximum opening height is programmable to prevent owners of garages with low roofs from meeting their quota of irrational swearing.

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Cup holders have captured the collective imagination in Ingolstadt, and it shows inside the Q7, which boasts no less than six cup holders, as well as four bottle holders molded into the door panel pockets. Both the presentation to the press and the printed media materials burble about the quantity of cup holders with an unbridled, almost exaggerated glee. “The Germans were asking us,” chided an ebullient Hoffmann the previous evening, “what are you doing in your cars over there?”

What we are doing in our cars, of course, is getting stuffed up in traffic. We roll out of Carlsbad at 8:30am and onto Interstate 5, a glimmering ribbon of asphalt that elegantly wends along the Pacific coast and is also, at 8:30 in the morning, a six-lane parking lot. It looks like complete chaos, but the logjam allows me to try the adaptive cruise control, which on the Q7 allows speeds down to a complete stop. The electronics will apply the brakes to halt the car a safe distance from the vehicle in front, resuming a crawling pace when surrounding traffic does.

Our test car also came with Side Assist, a brilliant system which monitors traffic immediately in the car’s blind spot, signaling the presence of another vehicle by illuminating a strip of amber LEDs on the inside of the side view mirrors. Side Assist worked flawlessly at detecting cars but not, I must point out, the homeless guy holding a shabby cardboard sign on the shoulder of the highway. The adaptive cruise control, however, worked fantastically well at allowing both my passenger and I to idle past without having to make eye contact, safe behind the tinted lenses of our sunglasses and swaddled in the cleansing sterility of Cricket leather upholstery.

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The centrally mounted navigation screen doubles as a display for a rear-view camera system. When the Q7 is placed in reverse, it switches over to whatever is seen by a miniature camera mounted inside the grab handle on the lift gate. The system then overlays lines on the display that estimate where the Q7 will go when backing up. When huddled in morning traffic on a California highway, those lines project directly into the windshield of whoever has chosen to cozy up to the Q7’s tailpipe, and the rear view camera’s 130-degree field of vision means that you can gleefully see every one of their panicked motions when the Audi’s backup lights wink on.

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“I wonder if they’d let us run a slalom in reverse with that thing,” says my passenger.

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It is an average morning on Palomar Mountain. The air is moist, soupy with fog and smells of a vegetable crisper. Mountain lions prowl the terrain with a velveteen grace. And somewhere near its base, nearly one million dollars’ worth of Audi Q7s are inching their way up a series of narrow hardscrabble switchbacks that have been chiseled out of the rock face.

As the drop-off runs less than a foot from the tires on my side, I subconsciously make a checklist of the various safety features that were covered at the press conference the night before. Front airbags? Check. Side airbags? Check. Head curtain bags? Check. Reinforced steel roof pillars? Check. To which my mind adds one last item: Clenched sphincter? Check. Pressing down hard on the whole experience is the understanding that if I bin it now, I get to experience all of them simultaneously. I wonder to myself if this is a good time to tell my co-driver that I am petrified of heights.

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But the end never comes. Even though the road has narrowed and the Q7 is running close enough to the mountain wall to hear the engine bleating off the rock, the big Audi is composed and sure in its actions. Part of this is due to an off-road calibration for the integrated stability control program, which allows the driver a limited amount of wheel spin and side-slipping around corners. The other part is a deft engineering sleight-of-hand which made the Q7 nearly as wide as Infiniti’s road-train QX56 without being needlessly bulky and cumbersome. Fifty feet ahead the ground is scalloped out where some unlucky off-roader bogged down in the mud. “I wonder if this thing has a skid plate?” I ask out loud. The Audi flows through the ruts and finds a hidden rock with a wrenching thud before proceeding off.

My co-driver looks up from his map. “What were you just asking?”

“I said, I wonder if this thing’s insured.”

After five more miles of playing in the mud and hearing rocks carom off the Audi’s underside, we break above the cloud line and are greeted by a ridiculously blue sky. Shortly thereafter, paved roads rise up to meet our tires. As we apex the mountain, signs direct us to a rest area where Audi has set up a hospitality tent. We grab rapacious handfuls of free Q7-branded energy bars, Q7-branded bottled water and Q7-branded napkins to clean up with. Having just successfully scaled Palomar, and with the air suspension now set to “dynamic” per the instructions from another Audi staffer in another black twill shirt, we set down the other side.

At the top of Palomar Mountain is Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, which houses a reflecting telescope with a mirror a staggering 200 inches in diameter. During assembly of the observatory, a road was needed that was both gradual and gently curved enough to allow safe transport of the telescope’s 40-ton optics safely to the summit. The result is an eleven-mile, glass-smooth two-lane stretch of concrete that criss-crosses the mountain’s eastern face. It took over 18 hours for three diesel tractors slaved together to push the finished mirror up to the observatory in 1947. Pushing the Q7 as hard as we would dare to hustle an SUV through the corners, we would cover the same distance in a notch over eight minutes.

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It’s remarkable what eight minutes can do to your perception of a car. Up to the point that we started down, the Q7 was a comfortable on-road family hauler with some impressive off-road abilities. But until you grab it by the scruff of its neck and drive it with some huevos, you will never truly understand the car’s greatness. The “dynamic” suspension setting drops the Q7 six-tenths of an inch lower than its standard ride height. If 100mph is held for more than twenty seconds, the suspension drops an additional six-tenths – a feature that neither the lengths of road nor our girly-man huevos would allow us to verify. When tossed into a corner, a roll stabilization system will tighten up the damping rate on the Q7’s outboard corner and give the entire suspension as much forgiveness at that of a loaded CN freight car. To say that the adhesion between the Audi and the road is tenacious is to insult peanut butter on the roof of your mouth.

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It also makes the Q7 extremely docile at its limits. At no point did the car want to do anything other than what input I fed it. Even at speeds that would have sent a Chevy Tahoe into the bushes, the Audi felt nearly as reassuring as the S4 Avant that was tested by this site last year. No closed eyes, no Hail Marys, no scared-cow sounds. Inertia, as much as it tried, could not send the Q7 off in new and exciting directions. That handling aplomb is all the more impressive when you realize that the Audi Q7 weighs in at 5,300 pounds, which makes its lightness on its feet recall the ballerina hippos from Disney’s Fantasia.

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Although there a plans for a V6 model in the future, only the V8 – of which there are two trim levels, Base and Premium – will be available at rollout. Base Q7 4.2 models check in at $49,900 and are equipped with 18-inch wheels, leather seating surfaces, power front seats with driver’s memory, Bose audio system with a six-disc CD changer, the aforementioned power rear lift gate, and adaptive bi-Xenon headlamps that turn in conjunction with the steering wheel. 4.2 Premium models raise the cost of entry by another $10,000 and have a DVD navigation system, rear view camera, four-zone climate control, heated front and rear seats, a three-panel glass sunroof that extends over the rear seats, and satellite radio. Our test car had the optional air suspension, side-assist blind spot monitoring system and 20-inch wheels with performance tires, which raises the price another $3900.

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There are two ways to look at the Audi Q7. See it as a replacement for a sporty car, and it really isn’t all that good. It’s hardly the ticket to get 5-series and A6 owners sprinting for the drool bucket. See it as a true performance SUV in a market overrun by the Mercedes-Benz M-Class and BMW X5, and it is a thing of brilliance. Audi believes that enough buyers will be sold on the Q7’s virtues to make the car a success, and over 25% of those sales will be to families with at least two other Audi cars in the garage. But at nearly $65,000 for a fully-equipped Q7, and with the already tremulous global oil futures market being upset on a weekly basis, meeting those goals may prove to be more ambitious than navigating any bombed-out, pockmarked mountain road.

2007 Audi Q7 –
Front engine, all wheel drive, 5 to 7 passenger, 5-door wagon
Base price: $49,900
Price as tested(including destination): $64,870
Destination charge: $720

Options:
20” Alloy Wheels with High Performance Tires – $800
Adaptive Air Suspension – $2,600
Audi Side Assist – $500
Rear Side Airbags – $350

Drivetrain:
Engine: 4.2L, DOHC, 32-valve V8, aluminum block and heads, direct-chamber fuel injection
Horsepower: 350hp @ 6800rpm
Torque: 325lb-ft @ 3500rpm
Transmission: Six-speed automatic with manual shift mode

Dimensions:
Wheelbase (in.): 118.2
Length (in.): 200.2
Width (in.): 78.1
Height (in.): 68.4 (steel-spring suspension)

Performance (manufacturer’s est.):
0-60 (sec.): 7.0
¼ mile (sec.): 15.1
Top speed: 130mph (governed)

Fuel economy (EPA estimated mpg):
City/Highway: 14 / 19