Audi SQ7 review: The luxury SUV which ticks all the boxes … except one
The big, chesty Audi SQ7 has the intimidating yet polished presence of a professional rugby player and a boot perfect for taking the family to the snow. But there’s a glaring omission.
Letter writers, grab your poisonest pens, for I am about to indulge in some gender stereotyping. I have observed, over many years, that when a group of people is shown around someone’s impressive new house, or even a real-estate open home, the women – and it is only them in my experience – will always comment, in a fawning, face-fanning manner, over the cupboards and the amount of shelving therein.
This almost arousal over storage space (linen cupboards, in particular, seem to provoke loud oohs and ahhs) has long baffled me, so much so that I once suggested, as an anniversary gift, getting an Actual Man in to build my wife a big cupboard in our house. Strangely – although you might have guessed this before I did – she responded by kneeing me in the groin and shouting. A lot.
I must admit I feel the same way about cupboards as I do about the load space in cars. A car boot is either small or large – and telling me, as car companies love to do, how many litres it holds seems as pointless and dull as telling me how many calories are in a burger.
There is a point at which the size of a vehicle’s boot suddenly seems to matter, however, and that is when you are heading off on a family holiday, and even more so if that trip will involve skiing. Truly, skiing is a singularly silly sport and one that I wish I wasn’t so hopelessly in love with. I also believe that encouraging your kids to take it up is like giving them a white-powder habit; one that will cost them a fortune while making them think they look cool and are part of the ritzy end of society.
I have skiied blind in blizzards while unable to feel my hands or locate my testicles and should probably have broken all the bones in my body by now (a risk-taking, speed-loving psyche and skiing are not a good mix) and I have collected an absurd amount of skiing gear, all of which I like to take to the slopes with me, just in case. Throw in even more stuff for my wife and two children, and the actual skis, poles, boots and some modern gadgets called “helmets” and clearly I need a car with a boot the size of a grain silo.
What this all adds up to is an SUV and, while I’d always rather drive a car, or a station wagon, a trip from Sydney to the slippery Snowy Mountains is one time I’ll admit one of these big trucks is the smart choice, particularly if you can get your hands on an Audi SQ7. This big, chesty beast has the intimidating yet polished presence of a professional rugby player and, vitally, a 617-litre boot.
While that number means little to me I can tell you that it’s so big that I got all of our bags and bobs in, with the skis shoved through the folded-down middle rear seat, without resorting to crushing things, crying or insisting that children didn’t need Ugg boots in my day.
The resultant cost of this luxury, of course, is that the SQ7 is massive (5m long, 2.2m wide and 1.7m high) and weighs a stolid 2340kg. That should make it a bit dull to drive, and it used to when this model came with a diesel engine, but the new version gets the same 4.0-litre twin-turbo petrol V8 you’ll find in a Lamborghini Urus, a Porsche Cayenne or an Audi RS Q8 (they’re all part of the VW family).
In SQ7 guise it makes 373kW and 770Nm, which is enough to hurl all this vehicle, my family and eight tonnes of Goretex and fluff to 100km/h in barely a touch over four seconds.
The SQ7 is fast, then, and with its adaptive sport air suspension and four-wheel steering, which turns the rear wheels in line with the front ones at higher speeds for more stability, it can also carve up the fabulous selection of bends you can find around Jindabyne with genuine involvement. Throw it into Dynamic mode, which lowers the ride height of the car for more serious ground-hugging fun, and the steering even muscles up to a more enticing setting.
As someone who hates to like SUVs, I found the Audi SQ7 disappointingly enjoyable, although if you’d told me there was a shouty six under the bonnet instead of a V8 I’d have believed you – its one failing is that it’s not as loud as it should be. Audi might respond that it offers louder, gaudier RS models for that kind of hooligan, and there’s no denying that the SQ7 is an unflappable and infallible partner for a family trip to the snow, with its plush interior and Bang & Olufsen sound system pleasing the rest of my family as much as driving this SUV impressed me.
It also managed to impress the hell out of an Audi Q7 owner who parked next to me and gushed over my S badges. I was far more blown away by his boot, which was filled with stacked storage containers, like Ikea for elves – all of them perfectly packed with enough skiing paraphernalia for a family of five. It was so beautiful I nearly had to fan my face in awe. But I didn’t, because I’m a man.
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Audi SQ7
ENGINE: 4.0-litre V8 (373kW/770Nm)
FUEL ECONOMY: 12.1 litres per 100km
TRANSMISSION: 8-speed automatic, all-wheel drive
PRICE: $164,100
RATING:★★★★
