The 2022 Audi S3 Is a Fun Sport Sedan that Rivals the Golf R

this is the new 2022 audi s3 and it's a fun little sport sedan it's also totally new for the 2022 model year redesigned from the old s3 this new one has over 300 horsepower all-wheel drive and a starting price of just under fifty thousand dollars and today i'm going to review it before i get started be sure to check out cars and bids which is my enthusiast car auction website for cool cars from the modern era with free listings you can list your cool car for free and auction it on cars and bids and we've had some fantastic sales recently including this mercedes amg e63s wagon sold for 108 000 this great porsche cayenne diesel sold for almost 38 thousand dollars we've done great with cayenne's and this audi tt brought forty thousand dollars if you're looking to buy or sell a cool enthusiast car from the modern era the 1980s and up cars and bids is the place to do it with daily auctions and great selection at carsandbids.com so let's talk s3 this one is all new like i said fully redesigned for the 2022 model year and of course it's based on the audi a3 now the s3 is only the pretty sporty one if you want a real high performance version of this car that would be the rs3 but it's not out yet audi says later this summer or early fall but the s3 isn't exactly slow like i said over 300 horsepower 306 to be precise using the very same turbo four-cylinder you'll find in the volkswagen golf r also like the golf r the s3 comes standard with all-wheel drive and the two cars have some pretty similar performance numbers but there are some key differences which i'll show you and today i'll also show you everything else first i'll take you on a thorough tour of the new s3 and show you all of its interesting quirks and features then i'll get it out on the road and drive it and then i'll give it a dug score all right i'm going to start the quirks and features of the s3 and one of the big things i want to start with is the fact that this car addresses a lot of the issues that i brought up as being negative points about the golf r i mentioned earlier that the cars share the same engine they both have all-wheel drive they're very similar but this solves some of the golf r's problems one of my biggest issues with the golf r was the materials quality in the interior i didn't think it was really up to par for the price point well the s3s is a lot better you can see this interior very high quality very modern and luxurious it looks very nice and frankly it fits in with a luxury car at this price point at this level it really looks kind of like what you'd expect in here now it isn't perfect there are still some areas that could use some improvement like the dashboard i guess this is cheap vinyl but it really just kind of looks like plastic it's not all that attractive same deal on the door panel they have a little bit more plasticy vinyl than i would like but there are also some nice benefits like these attractive seats with this like quilted stitched leather looks very good you have some nice trim in places some like silvers and gloss blacks that all look better than what you find in the golf r now another big benefit the s3 has over the golf r is fixed climate controls in the golf r the climate controls are integrated into the center screen which isn't great and it's especially not great in that car because the center screen usability is not really all that good to be totally honest in this car you don't have to worry about center screen usability because the climate controls are fixed in place you can see them here buttons switches adjust the temperature the airflow all that stuff you'd normally use climate controls for there are hard buttons so you don't have to go into menus and screens in order to use your climate controls that's another big plus the s3 over the golf r and of course there's another big benefit here which is for frankly the audi badge even though these cars are relatively similar in a lot of ways the audi badge just carries more weight carries more respect more luxury connotations than the volkswagen badge and although a lot of car shoppers won't admit to themselves that's one reason they choose a luxury brand over a mainstream brand it is and the audi badge is also helpful in making this car more appealing than the golf r and believe it or not probably the biggest point in favor of the s3 is actually pricing a lot of times when you're comparing a mainstream model to a luxury brand model that's based on that mainstream model a luxury brand is way more expensive but not in this case a golf r starts around 44 600 with shipping this starts at 46 800 with shipping so this is only 2 000 more and you get an audi instead of a volkswagen you get an improved interior and improved tech at least for the climate controls so there's not really a huge drawback to choosing the s3 over the golf r now with that said there are some benefits of the golf r over the s3 and one is very obvious right back here the s3 has a trunk whereas the golf r of course is a hatchback now for some car enthusiasts that ends the discussion right there because a lot of car people prefer hatchbacks just generally to sedans and they would pick the golf r just because of that but even if you're open to both body styles of course the hatchback is more practical than a sedan it has more space in back for cargo for stuff if you want to fold down the seats and so the golf has a little bit more practicality and then there's the powertrain these cars have the same engine 2-liter turbo four-cylinder made it all-wheel drive like i've mentioned but the golf r has a little bit more power 315 horsepower in the golf r versus 306 horsepower in the s3 and the golf r has more torque this car is at 295 pound-feet of torque the golf r is at 310 pound-feet so there's an advantage for horsepower and torque with a volkswagen however it's important to point out that acceleration times aren't really different between the two cars both of them are quoting in the mid 4 second range 0-60 which is very quick and neither one seems to have a big advantage but it is important to note that transmission is also a big differentiator between these cars the s3 is only offered with a 7-speed dual clutch automatic the golf r is also offered with the same transmission but you can get a golf r with a manual transmission if you want so if you want a manual or if you want a hatchback the golf r is the one for you otherwise i see a lot of benefit to the s3 over the volkswagen bottom next up moving back inside the s3 i want to go over the rest of its quirks and features starting with a rather unusual one on the door panel that would be the door handle that you pull to open the door which is very strangely shaped it's not a loop or like a traditional door handle it almost looks like a jagged edge gun pointing down i'm not really sure if you're supposed to lift from the bottom or from the top it's just kind of a strange thing but it does add some daring style to this interior but anyway next up moving a little bit more inside another unusual control and here is the shift lever which is actually more like a shift switch you can see it here you pull it back for d or drive you push it up for r reverse neutral's in the middle and then you access park by pressing this little rectangular button above all that sort of strange and unorthodox but not as strange and unorthodox as the volume control in this car which is here you can see there's a circle with some controls on off mute next and previous track so where's volume well you slide your finger in a circle around this circle in order to turn the volume up or down it's a very unusual control but it's actually pretty easy to use once you figure it out just slide your finger around and the volume changes and it's certainly better than having that integrated into the touchscreen or little tap tap tap buttons like in some cars but anyway next up another interesting interior quirk would be the sunroof sunroof opens up just like in a normal car nothing unusual there but you can close this mesh sunshade when the sunroof is open so you can have the sunroof open and wind blowing into the car but then the mesh sunshade is closed so you're getting shaded from the sun but you're still getting the fresh air from the roof which is pretty cool i think only volkswagen and audi allow that the sunshade to close when the sunroof is open and actually i find myself enjoying it more and more every time i'm in one of these cars next up another interesting quirk in this interior would be the fact that the interior itself is very angled take a look at the dashboard you don't see any like sweeping curves here like in many modern cars there's just angles everywhere straight horizontal and angles going side to side and hexagons and everything is angled in here and i guess it's to give it sort of an aggressive interior look modern and maybe even a little bit sporty as opposed to sweeping curves those are for old people in the s3 we have angles and next up another notable item in here probably the only thing that is curved the steering wheel i love the steering wheel on this car i love the little golf ball texture on the side the part where you actually grab this is kind of a hallmark of sporty outies and it's nice to see it in here too it looks and feels pretty good but anyway next i want to go into the infotainment system and i have to say this is not my very favorite infotainment system the entire car industry for one thing it can be a little bit slow to respond you tap in and it takes a little longer than some screens which are a little bit more immediate also the screen is a little small and so when you're on the home screen displaying three items at once it's a little difficult to really see everything in all of them it's all kind of compact a little bit but it does work relatively well it's reasonably intuitive to get between various different items to pair phones or put in a navigation destination or go to settings pretty much anything you might want it's relatively easy in this system but again not my very favorite though i am just happy they didn't integrate the climate controls however any complaints about this center screen are instantly forgiven when you go to use the gauge cluster screen audi kind of pioneered gauge cluster screens like five years ago full screen gauge clusters and they still do it better than basically anybody else this screen is wonderfully configurable you can adjust the view to prioritize basically whatever you want if you want to see the speed or the tachometer you can see that a little larger or if you want to see other things like music phone whatever you can choose what you want to display largely and of course you can always choose to have the map displayed right there in the gauge cluster full screen full color full resolution it's a fantastic thing and it's really really easy to use and it also cuts down on some of your use of the center infotainment screen since so much good information is right in front of you you don't have to use the kind of lesser screen in my opinion quite as often by the way one interesting quirk worth noting in this screen i still love that audi refers to the trip odometers not as like trip a or trip b but instead short term memory and long term memory giving some personification to the gauge cluster screen trip odometer situation in your s3 also interesting in this vicinity i like the fact that you have a hidden storage compartment over here to the left of the steering wheel you see there's this little panel you open it up and that's where you can store stuff and it's actually pretty big and relatively useful you get a little ticket at a parking garage or you have your parking garage card stuff like that you just want to keep over there you have a pocket just for the driver it's kind of nice but anyway next we move into the back seat of the s3 and i have to say it's pretty small the back seat is not especially sizable back here i moved the front seat up to get back here my knees are still pushing into it digging into it my head is right up against the ceiling but that's all pretty common in a vehicle like this ultimately these s3s are mainly purchased by single people or couples who aren't going to be transporting people and especially adults in the back seat very often they want it here just for occasional use and this back seat does work for occasional use or for kids adults for short trips it's not something you'd want to use often for adults but it works in a pinch anyway a couple of interesting items in this back seat one you have climate vents back here which is pretty nice for a car like this you even have climate control temperature this little wheel lets you adjust from cold to hot you don't get to adjust the amount of climate control like the fan speed but i will take climate vents in a temperature adjuster especially in the back of a little car like this you don't usually see that now you can also see back here you have usb-c ports for device charging which is a nice modern device charging situation in the back of this car other than the stuff in the center though not really all that much interesting about this back seat although i must say it too has a materials quality advantage over the golf r one of my complaints about the golf r's materials was that they cheaped out in the back seat and a great example of that was on the door panel you can see the front door panels had simply higher quality materials than the back door panels they had specifically de-contented the rear doors just to save a few bucks and it was cynical and it looked bad they didn't do that in the s3 you can see the door panels still have the same quality same materials same trim which is obviously nicer and the back seats have the same quilted leather as you had up front which also looks very nice very luxurious even though these back seats probably won't get used all that often it's the mark of a luxury car but anyway next we move around back in the s3 and it is worth pointing out again the s3 is not as practical as the golf r by being a sedan with a trunk instead of a hatchback with a cargo area the s3 just has a little disadvantage here but it should be pointed out that the s3's trunk is pretty big you pop it open and you can see it's a fairly large trunk especially for a compact car like this it has some pretty good space although i should point out that the trunk is sort of disappointingly basic for a couple reasons one there's no trunk mounted releases back here to fold down the back seat you don't have like a latch you can pull to unlatch the back seat so you can fold it down the back seat does fold down but most new cars where i'm getting the trunk they have a latch back here you can pull and it just pops the back seats down and that would be nice to have here it's also a little bit disappointing that there's no under trunk floor storage back here so many new cars have that but if you lift up the floor and the s3's trunk the battery is here now they do that for weight distribution to make the car less front heavy and so from a performance perspective that's a good thing but it'd be nice to have underfloor storage so you can keep items separated if you want to like so many cars offer but anyway next up since i'm outside the s3 i want to talk over the exterior a little more generally specifically the design and style of this car frankly i really like it and i like the golf r also for the same reason it's subtle it's simple this is a fun fast performance car but it doesn't shout to everybody how fast it is with all sorts of scoops and inlets and wings like some of these cars do it's nice and subtle and simple and frankly beautiful and i think this car looks great and the golf r does too these are some of the better looking kind of compact performance cars of the modern era and one other really important thing that i absolutely love about this car is the sizing is just perfect in fact this car kind of reminds me of a modern take on the old school b5 audi s4 the s4 everybody loved that was sold at the end of the 90s in the early 2000s that car was 177 inches long and it had 270 horsepower now the new audi s4 is also a great car and it's become way more powerful but it's also gotten bigger the latest s4 is almost a foot longer than that old school b5 s4 but this car is 177 inches long just like the old b5 and it has 306 horsepower even more than the b5 s4 this feels like the revival of that very famous audi from back then the modern take on the b5 s4 let's just hope this turns out to be a little more reliable but anyway next up looking at a few interesting details on the outside of this car for one in back you have quad exhaust four different exhaust tips back here makes it look like a cool sporty high performance car which is a neat look to have and speaking of the quad exhaust well for one thing all four of the exhaust pipes are connected you can see under the car yes they are a real quad exhaust system audi and other brands have tried in the past to get away with like half of the exhaust being fake but that isn't the case here but anyway speaking of the quad exhaust they sound well okay sporty-ish like you might expect for this car take a listen and next up these wheels are also interesting they're not especially beautiful or performancy but they look fine the quirky part is that they say audi sport on them just once in red on the side of the wheel just so everybody really knows this is a sport audi also interesting with this car is the way the turn signals work in back i absolutely love these sweeping turn signals you can see them here they are beautiful and eye-catching and it's a really cool thing to do to make even your turn signals look cool now in the past i've told you that audi wasn't able to offer true sweeping turn signals on u.s market cars because our regulation says that a large portion of the turn signal must light up on its first click basically but audi has figured out an interesting way around that if you look closely when these turn signals are on you can see that the entire turn signal lights up with each flash but just dimly and that satisfies the regulation and then the brighter part the sweeping part can do its thing sort of on top of the dim turn signal take a close look and you can see the dim part lights up with each flash and then the sweeper goes across and they figured out a neat way around that kind of stupid regulation so we get our cool sweeping turn signals and so those are the quirks and features of the new audi s3 now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives all right driving the new s3 now i know that some people watching well it's not the rs3 i'll get to the rs3 but the s3 has a pretty good place in the enthusiast world if you want something that's like sporty and fun but you don't necessarily want to spend the big money or get the crazy power and performance the rs3 this car has a pretty good compromise and years ago i owned a 2001 audi a4 a b5 a4 and like i was saying about the b5 s4 it's that right size like that car was so popular and so desirable back then i think it's reasonable that like a cool sporty car the same size is still a desirable vehicle and it certainly is to me so let's talk s3 now just like the golf r i think the power train is fantastic very punchy very exciting you step on it and it moves uh and it's surprisingly quick 0 to 60 in like four and a half 4.6 seconds that is a strong strong figure uh for any car obviously and it's pretty nice for a car like this only sort of the mid performance car in this lineup and also when you're accelerating the other thing is it sounds reasonably good from inside the car now it doesn't sound that great on the outside and that rev clip i showed you in part because for some reason when audi's rev in park they're limited to like 3000 rpm or 4000 rpm so you can never really hear them all that well when you're inside the car you do get more sound but it's not like exceptionally muscular or growly it ultimately just feels like it sounds like a two-liter four-cylinder but i don't think a lot of people are buying this car for the sound i think they kind of know the score when they're buying it that it's not gonna sound like a real like muscle car the really cool thing about this car in addition to the acceleration being quite astonishingly nice is the handling is fantastic and i said this in that golf r review as well and this car drives a lot like the golf r the steering is good very communicative and precise especially for a vehicle based on a front wheel drive car and i'm pretty impressed with the way that this steers the way that this handles i think it's very well balanced i think it's surprisingly comfortable for a pretty good handling car which is not always easy to do a lot of cars i drive gt3s and porsches and stuff like that they handle incredibly but they it really comes with the sacrifice of ride quality obviously this doesn't handle like those but it still you know it holds its own and it's a reasonably comfortable and nice car now a steering precision isn't quite what it is in like an rs6 or an r7 or a real true sports car and handling there you do feel a little bit of body roll maybe a little bit of understeer but we're not talking about i mean that's it's still quite good considering what this car is and i'm pretty impressed with it uh from a steering handling and drivability perspective really though to me what sticks out about this car is it's a pretty good deal i was lamenting the fact in the golf r review that the golf r cost so much money and i'm still kind of surprised in fact when i saw that this car was only two thousand dollars more expensive base price i i checked like four times like really okay i went on their website really this is okay okay in order to really sell it to me like this car to me offers quite a few more advantages the audi badge is the biggest advantage that's going to sell this car to the most people there are a lot of people out there oh i wouldn't buy a car because a badge i would only buy it because it's the best yeah well when why didn't you buy a kia stinger you know that car would have sold more if if that was really true people want the audi badge so you pay 2 000 more which is really not all that much uh to get the audi badge to get better infotainment the golf r's infotainment and climate control setup has been universally criticized and you get a better interior and the golf r's the latest golf r's interior has also been fairly well criticized and i don't really see quite as many of those problems in the s3 it still could be nicer in here but it's better than the golf r you only lose the hatchback in the manual transmission and the manual is a big deal if you want a manual car that's it that's the ball game it doesn't matter all the drawbacks the golf are you get the golf r um the hatchback thing i think i could live with in order to have an audi spend only two grand more and get a better place to sit frankly where you're where you're spending all your time frankly i think that this car checks a lot of boxes for a lot of people it's little and so it's good for city driving it's nice and compact you can park it anywhere and it's fun and it's fast and it handles well and it's got a lot of nice sporty benefits but it's also like a nice car it's got you know beaded seats dual zone climate control you know all sorts of nice cameras and technology the screen and the in the gauge cluster now obviously i'm very excited to drive the rs3 because that's the ultimate cool incredible vehicle but if you're not spending that money or if you don't just need that stuff this car offers a pretty nice compromise and i think it compares quite favorably uh to a golf r as long as you won't miss the hatchback or the stick shift and so that's the new 2022 audi s3 this is a pretty desirable sedan relatively sporty fun to drive exciting nice looking good tech and it solves a lot of the problems that i have with the new volkswagen golf r anyway now it's time to give the new s3 a doug score and the dug score is here 61 out of 100 which places the new s3 in a good spot against its competition you'll note the new s3 also ties the volkswagen golf r but it's important to keep in mind the golf r gets two extra points for practicality so the s3 is better overall unless you need that hatchback cargo space if you do get the golf r otherwise the s3 is a more compelling choice with good power nice styling and a better interior than many rivals including the golf r [Music]

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 479,362

Keywords: 2022 audi s3, audi s3, 2022 audi s3 review, audi s3 review, s3, s3 review, 2022 s3 review, new s3, new audi s3, new audi s3 review, audi, audi review, audi s3 or golf r, doug demuro, demuro, doug de muro

Id: cKpMvUmzhJM

Length: 23min 34sec (1414 seconds)

Published: Tue May 24 2022