Audi SQ8 TFSI Vorsprung 2021 UK first drive

The new SQ8 Vorsprung is an appealingly traditional kind of Audi; the kind that reminds you that this company is still world class when it’s using the very best technology at its disposal to make the most accomplished luxury cars that it can. 

Sounds simple enough. The trouble is, when you start making arbitrary rules about the kinds of engines that your lower-order performance cars should have, or branching out into vital developing areas of the market (like electric cars), you can often make life hard for yourself by ruling out the most direct route to ‘vorsprung durch technik’.

Rules are made to be broken, luckily; and even when Audi first set out to switch so many of its ‘S’-badged performance models from petrol- to diesel engines back in 2019 in order to drive down the emissions burden they place on the company’s fleet CO2 average, it made exceptions. The S8, S3, Audi SQ2 and TT S have remained petrol-engined options all along. Now, as Audi introduces both to the North American market, the SQ7 and SQ8 performance SUVs have switched from diesel to petrol.

For the SQ8, that means swapping a 429bhp 4.0-litre hybridised turbodiesel V8 for the VW Group’s Porsche-designed ‘EA825’ 4.0-litre turbo petrol V8. In its various states of tune, this engine powers so many Bentleys and Porsches, the odd Lamborghini and even some of Audi’s faster RS models. In the SQ8 it makes a slightly detuned but still very hearty 500bhp; it causes the car’s 0-62mph dash tumble from 4.8- to 4.1sec; but also makes WLTP lab-test fuel economy tumble from 36.2mpg to 22.1-.

Clearly there will be some owners who were well-served by an SQ8 TDI who won’t be quite as well-served in every way by an SQ8 TFSI. Even so, Audi claims that most of the recent growth at the upper end of the luxury SUV market has been fuelled by petrol engines; and you can’t imagine too many people who can afford a car like this caring too much whether it does a real-world 20- or 28mpg - especially if having the former happens to bring certain other advantages for the car with it, which it undoubtedly does in this case.

This is a fine petrol engine. It can change from super-refined, through rich and mellifluous, to become growlingly, distantly menacing as you cycle through the drive modes. It’s got great throttle response, revs keenly, and it develops more than enough grunt to keep life interesting in any 2.3-tonne luxury SUV. Drive in dynamic mode and the slightly brusque-feeling paddleshift manual upshifts delivered by the gearbox are the only way in which any part of the SQ8’s new powertrain ever comes close to attracting your ire.