An everyday supercar!

'Everyday supercar' - There's a phrase that' been misused before. It seems that any supercar with a boot big enough for one Tesco bag, a CD player and rear seats for your legless friends can be justified as an everyday supercar. Although, that's not something I agree with.

An everyday car has to do a lot more, for instance, it needs enough space for those family days out, what if you, your wife and 3 kids wanted to go on a picnic somewhere, with the dog as well? And what about for work, you may need to carry a lot of tools or equipment but don't fancy a van, would you have enough space in your R8? And for a true everyday car, you can't be sweating every time you take it out, petrified you might damage your pristine paintwork etc...

So, can such a thing exist? Can you get a car big enough for a full family, rugged enough for your work horse  and not so stupidly expensive that you're scared to drive it - but with Ferrari rivaling performance?

Yes, you can, and it's with great pleasure that I introduce you to the Audi RS6 (C5), and in particular, the avant. Here we have a 4.2 litre twin turbo V8, with 5 seats and a boot plenty big enough for most everyday challenge.

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The car was produced from July 2002, up until September 2004, and was Audi's top of the line product throughout these years, boasting over 400bhp, a beautifully spec'd interior, with leather Recaro bucket seats, very similar to those in the Aston Martin Vanquish. The RS6 also took advantage of Audi's brilliant all-wheel drive Quattro system, which made the RS6 a very usable car on the roads.

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So, with 5 seats and 455 litres of space in the boot of the avant, it's clear that the RS6 adheres to the everyday part, but how well does it perform as a supercar? In order to check this, let's compare the RS6 to a supercar of the day, the Ferrari 360 Modena. Now, every supercar needs a healthy dose of power, if it didn't, what would owners of them have to boast about? The Ferrari has a more than satisfactory 395bhp from it's 3.6 litre V8, but the Audi manages a brutal 473bhp from it's twin turbo V8, a huge difference of 78bhp - or that of a small VW engine.

But power is nothing without torque, and Ferrari know this, which is why the 360 Modena produces a more than capable 373 Nm. Again, the RS6 can blow this figure away, as it produces a huge 560 Nm, almost 200 Nm more!

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However, these are just numbers. It doesn't matter how much power the RS6 makes, it needs it, after all it's a heavy estate car, whereas the Ferrari is a purpose built supercar, low to the ground and much lighter that the RS6, which means it needs a lot less power. This doesn't mean you'd get left behind at the traffic lights in your RS6 though, as the 0-100kph times are only 0.4 of a second slower than the Ferrari, at 4.7 seconds. That's pretty damn fast for a 10 year old estate car! It doesn't stop there either, as the Audi will continue to speeds over 170mph, at which point it will stop, thanks to the Brembo front brakes, with 8 piston monoblock brake calipers coupled with floating and radially vented brake discs. 

So there you have it, an everyday practical motor that has genuine supercar qualities. It's not like they're even expensive cars, with a kick-off price close to only £7k, they're more than £3k cheaper than a new base spec fiesta! Needless to say, if something big goes wrong, don't expect a fiesta sized repair bill, and that's one point of supercar likeness any car could do without!

Thanks for reading!

Image sources: Here (1)
here (2) and here (3)