Ambitious But Rubbish

I am unfortunate enough to have gotten this loaned to me while my A4 is in the shop with a blown diverter valve (common with the 2.0T engine). It’s an absolutely hopeless vehicle. To quote Jeremy Clarkson, I have only one word to describe this, it starts with S and ends with T, and it isn’t “soot”.

The thing pitches to and fro if you even think about pushing either of the pedals in front of you, you’re sitting bolt upright like you were on a kitchen chair, and you literally have to lift your foot off the floor to be able to brake properly. Cornering is dismal with lots of body roll at even the lowest of speeds. It doesn’t even feel steady and planted while driving in a straight line on a flat road. Granted, it is a rental with 30,000 km on it, but I seriously dread being stuck with that heap on my drive home.

The interior is just a hopeless festival of cheap nastiness with plastics you frankly wouldn’t use for a dog’s water-bowl. As a habitué of the car company with the best interiors in the business I am rather spoilt of course, and this is probably not very high up on the trim scales, but I’ve seen 300s and Chargers that use the same nasty, paper-thin dimpled plastics on dashboards and inner door panels in the mid-2000s and it beggars belief that no one at Chrysler has, in all those years, decided that it was unacceptable for a car that you still have to pay 20 grand for.

Then again the journey is a replacement for Chrysler’s minivan line. Yes, it’s a glorified minivan. The vehicle for people who’ve given up on living. It has 3 rows of seats, which is perfect for when your better half is driving, your car-sickness-prone kid is in the front seat, and you can go sit all the way at the back, stare blankly out the window, remember the good old days when you were allowed to have some fun and wonder what’s happened to you since. Apparently it has stain-resistant seats, presumably so the car can reject the lonesome tear that falls from your eye as you reflect on those things…

To be honest the next time Audi Prestige tells me that they’ve got a Discount loaner for me I’m going to tell them I’d rather walk. This is my new “worst vehicle I’ve ever driven”. May I never get stuck driving something worse.