Audi A3 India Preview

Audi Group's Member of Board of Management for Marketing and Sales Luca De Meo feels that Audi’s story in India is one that defines success in a growth market. Encouraged by the prospect of a further developing luxury car market in 2014, Audi will be launching its popular A3 model in India, around mid-year. Moreover, the A3 will be locally produced, so we can expect Audi to price the A3 competitively against BMW’s 1 Series and Merc’s A-class.

However, Audi has decided to enter this price segment with the A3 Sedan, instead of a premium hatchback, as the trend has been seen with the other two German car makers. Officials at Audi told us that they have purposefully avoided bringing in the hatchback, but at the same time not ruled out the option altogether. Also, we were told that bringing to India the cabriolet variant is also a possibility. But first things first, let’s take a look at what the Audi A3 sedan is actually like.

The point of the Audi A3 sedan would be to offer a car with a relatively more affordable price tag, but an Audi nonetheless. And that wouldn’t be difficult as the A3 sedan’s design fits right into the Audi portfolio. If not anything, it looks like an A4 that has been scaled down a bit. And that’s a good thing, because the A4 is as sedan as a sedan gets.

Since the A3 is a compact saloon and has many global variants such as the cabriolet and the five-door ‘Sportback’ hatch, you’d expect it to be like a four-door coupe, say, like the Mercedes-Benz CLA class. Instead, the A3 Sedan follows the traditional three-box, four-door sedan design philosophy. It’s hard to believe that this one has evolved out of a hatchback.

The A3 sedan has very distinct shoulder lines, but it is nowhere as muscular and as aggressive as Merc’s CLA. That being said, the design is very clean, and the traditional A4-like grille and large 18-inch alloys add a sense of sophistication to a rather smallish sedan. The boot doesn’t look like an unwelcome addition; rather, the roof tapers down and blends into the shoulder line quite seamlessly. Being an Audi, the A3 will also get the daytime running headlamps, and sharp tail-lamps.

On the inside, you can definitely expect less leg-room for the rear cabin, and going by the way the roof merges into the boot, there might be less shoulder and head-room too, as compared to the A4. That being said, the interiors aren’t likely to be any less luxurious. Depending on the variant, the A3 is expected to offer a range of choice of interiors, from fabric, to artificial leather, to plush leather. In Ingolstadt, we checked out a few variants, and found that the things look typically Audi from the driver’s point of view. The presence of large, round aircon vents, a sleek, 7-inch infotainment screen, the instrument panel and the centre console bring a sense of familiarity and homology to the A3.

There’s no official word on the choice of engines for the A3 sedan, but going by the variants available in the global markets, we expect that the Indian portfolio might include a 1.4 and a 1.8 TFSI engines. And as all luxury car makers are raking in large numbers through their diesel options, we can safely assume that there would be at least two diesel options, namely the 1.8 and the 2.0 TDI engines. Even though the A3 would be slotted into a smaller, newer segment, customers would expect the engines to be very refined, and in case of the diesels, very torquey too.

The point of bringing in more affordable options in the market, by all the luxury car manufacturers, is to an extent the intent to draw a younger clientele towards these brands. With the A3 sedan, the prospects of Audi offering more brand value for a smaller price tag look very good. Sure, it may not be as spacious as the A4 – it would most definitely not be as powerful too – but it will be an Audi nonetheless. In India, this status works. And being locally produced, we can expect the A3 to be very competitively priced between ₹ 23 lakh and ₹ 30 lakh.

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