the_fat_engineer

I'm new to the AW forums, but I am here for a reason. I'm shopping for my next vehicle after thankfully getting myself out of the black hole that is Tesla. I couldn't deal with driving that car to the service center every other week, and I'm glad it's gone. I sold that thing back in 2021, and it's been a while since I needed a car, but times change.

I fell for the C7 S6 years ago, back when I was still a young teen. I loved the clean styling and simple interior, as well as the beautiful exhaust note. I used to see them driving out of the dealership that was a few blocks from my house all the time. I started looking at a few units that were for sale on the used market around the country, and I started looking for sources of info on these cars. I haven't been able to find a ton of info, so I figured I'd post some of my questions here. I should clarify, I'm looking at 2017-2018 model year units, only because my insurance doesn't like it when I buy cars that are older than 8 years, and those are the two model years that have Android Auto natively.

My questions on these cars are the following:

1. To those who own them, how are these cars to drive? What's your favorite points about the car?
2. I'm aware of the turbo filter screen issue on these V8s, but I don't know much more beyond that. Anyone have any information on this known issue or other known issues with the S6 powertrain/drivetrain?
3. What common issues should I know about in general on these cars? I should clarify that I live in the northeast, rust is always on my mind.
4. Are the sport seats comfortable for long drives? I am a slightly larger guy, hence my username, and I feel like I would prefer the comfort seats.
5. Does the adaptive cruise control work well? I've driven a few cars that have really good ACC, and a few that are pretty crap. Where does Audi's system stand?
6. What tires would y'all recommend I put on this car if/when I pick one up? I'm looking at PSAS4s, if there's others I should be aware of for all-season use I'd love to hear about them.
7. Is it worth it to go for a Prestige trim, or should I just look at Premium Plus cars and try to find one with LED headlights and the driver assistance package?
8. Finally, would you people say that the S6 is a fun car to drive, or that it's worth it to own one of these?

I'm excited to potentially join the club of Audi S owners. It might be a few months still until I manage to pick one up, but I'm excited nonetheless.

texasDFWS4

I’m on the other side of the spectrum being 60 but I had the S4 times 2 and I really like the full attention to detail Audi gave this car.

Avantly

Why doesn't your insurance like the older cars? The older my cars are, the cheaper they are to insure. I have basic coverage (no collision) on my C5's for under 35 bucks a month and that is almost 50% less than basic coverage on my C7 S6. It seems to scale almost identically for collision coverage if I had it. Do you shop around for insurance? I jump companies regularly. "Customer loyalty" discounts from insurance companies is a gimmick, if I quote with another company every 12 months it is almost always cheaper than my current one.
Why doesn't your insurance like the older cars? The older my cars are, the cheaper they are to insure. I have basic coverage (no collision) on my C5's for under 35 bucks a month and that is almost 50% less than basic coverage on my C7 S6. It seems to scale almost identically for collision coverage if I had it. Do you shop around for insurance? I jump companies regularly. "Customer loyalty" discounts from insurance companies is a gimmick, if I quote with another company every 12 months it is almost always cheaper than my current one.

In regards to the S6 in general:
--Maintenance intervals are short. You must service the DSG, torque vectoring differential, spark plugs, filters, etc etc etc very regularly. If you don't do this yourself, you should add a significant yearly maintenance budget, the extent of which will be determined by how many miles you put on it. The maintenance cost scales directly with the MSRP of the car, and the maintenance intervals scale inversely with the MSRP of the car.
--There are many common issues with this platform, keep in mind that materials quality has decreased every generation since the pinnacle in the late C5's, and you will be well advised to get a Ross Tech VAGCOM tool with VCDS to save money on the electrical faults. My latest fun: Oh, well, looks like the brake lights were not designed well and current sense threshold across the FETs wasn't characterized properly for low temperature. What's that? Your car is saying the brake lights are not working? Time to buy new ones (forget that, cutting the bastards apart and fixing the damn design).
--I like Conti DWS06 for all around driving on the S6. Not a super high performance tire but performs well year round. You do sometimes have to deal with the "DWS06 cold shake" when you get it out in the morning before the tires warm up, but I love the tires so much I just tolerate it, and I need to wait for the oil to reach temperature anyways, so meh.
--ACC works well. Need to look in to who has hacked this module so I can modify it to my liking, it's too tame even in dynamic mode. You can use it to follow even in stop and go traffic, if it comes to a complete stop and locks the brakes you simply give the gas pedal a light tap when the car in front of you starts moving and it's back to following no matter how low the speed. Speaking of ACC, have seen quite a few pre-facelift cars where Audi forgot to install the weather plugs in the connectors where there were no pins. This has caused water/salt ingress, I have completely disassembled both of my ACC sensors. Seeing this in other modules as well. Not sure if this is only on C7 but I would expect that it may be on C7.5 too. When you are in and poking around on your car, always good to inspect connectors for little details like this (as well as pins backing out of the connector shells due to not being fully inserted into the shell at the factory) as quality is decreasing year over year due to investors demanding increasing margins year over year no matter how the market is doing.
--Salt: My C7 S6 has only seen salt a few times ever and wow does it show. C5 was very good at salt resistance. C6 was worse. C7 is even worse. C7.5 will be even worse. Etc. I wouldn't plan on anything made after the 2000's lasting 10 years without notable rust so I wouldn't worry about it. If it's newer, and you drive it in salt/chlorides, it's going to rust out, there just isn't anything to be done about it. Heated garage with regular washing and full dry at night may slow this down but it is inevitable.
--Turbo screen. Was recently recalled. I am sure it will continue to be an issue. Fortunately, you'll be disassembling the car semi-regularly for other issues such as HPFP failure, oil separator failure, etc, so there will be plenty of opportunities to inspect this screen no matter what. These issues are nothing compared to other issues the 4.0T casting defects (you should see the 65k mile engine sitting in my garage that had a piece of the water jacket just sorta pop off for no reason... Fascinating. I suspect non-homogeneous silicate distribution, i.e. pure silicate occlusion or some such nonsense at the origin of the crack but I am not enough of a materials FA guy to prove this). Still waiting to see catastrophic failures of the cylinder deactivation apparatus, have been only a few posts regarding this that I've seen thus far which is promising.

In general, the car is an absolute monster and I'd like to get another one or two to just sit in the barn waiting for my current one to die. It is just past 100k miles now and despite having many current unrepaired issues and definitely needing a full rework of the DSG mechatronic unit and likely K1/K2 clutch replacement, I still love the car and launch mode on the DSG is just so much better than the ZF 8HP's "lauch mode" on the RS7/S8.

Steve Trac, Sec 303

My 2017 rear subframe is rusting enough that it was brought to my attention as something to address in near term. I can't imagine the pain in the a$$ that managing that will be: either cleaning/prepping/painting the existing on the car, or buying a second one, cleaning/prepping/painting that and installing from scratch. Ugggg. My 2012 S4 in the Northeast is CLEAN, no rust like this.

Avantly

It is more of an issue the newer the vehicle is. Look at the Toyota trucks. The 90's 4runners/tacomas/etc had frames rusting through and cracking after 10 years, or even less. The 2003-2009's were rusting through and cracking in 6-8 years or less (saw many of those with under 75k miles and holes in the frame). Now the new generation (5th gen? 6th gen? can't remember) are rusting through in 5 years. Some guy posted on T4R not that long ago freaking out because his low mileage 2018 4runner had literal holes through the frame. Toyota won the frame lawsuit for the trucks after 2003 so there will never be a frame recall again. Is what it is.

The C5 generation seem to be extremely resistant to rust, even my oldest one sitting out back with 250k Michigan miles on it only has a little bubble on one door where it got a deep scratch, and the subframe welds look meh but not really that bad. The C6's I see usually suffer pretty bad subframe rust but seem to hold together for 15+ years no problems. The fewer number of C7's I've seen are alarming, I do not drive my C7 S6 in winter anymore because of this but I suspect those are having extreme underbody rust by the 10 year point. I haven't owned anything newer but have heard numerous complains about rust on the C7.5 generation including some rust on the edges of body panels, so it just seems to be the natural progression of things towards the end of private vehicle ownership. The investors and politicians will make their margins even if that means forcing people into lease-only vehicle "ownership" and quality needs to decrease dramatically in order to maintain those margins and also keep people buying the latest piece of trash. Personally, my solution has been to drive out west whenever I have the time, find a rust free C5, and drive it back. I have a nice row of allroads in the barn, just waiting for attention and have accidentally accumulated a few C6 avants as well. Hopefully the peppermint oil actually keeps mice out of them, but I'll deal with mouse nests over rust any day of the week.