Audi A6 Avant review (2025 - 2026)
Audi A6 Avant cars for sale
3.0
Expert review
Pros
Low levels of wind and road noise
Lots of space for passengers
Smart styling helps it to stand out
Cons
Boot is small by class standards
Interior quality not as good as previous A6
Limited engine range
The CarGurus verdict
If you’re choosing an estate, you want a big boot. And it’s at this first hurdle that the A6 Avant falls. There are a few more it stumbles over thereafter, too: it isn’t particularly fuel efficient, the mild hybrid system that's paired with the diesel engine isn't always as smooth as you'd like, and if you want one as a company car, even the plug-in hybrid version is costly on tax.
In short, this is far from a perfect performance from Audi, which is a shame because the A6 Avant looks great, has a generally slick interior, and is a smooth, quiet way of munching miles on the motorway.
So as nice a thing as the A6 Avant is, it feels like something of a missed opportunity – and its rivals make a better case for themselves as smart luxury hold-alls.
What is the Audi A6 Avant?
If you’ve a nice detached house in suburbia, a couple of kids, and a dog, the chances are you’ve either owned or considered owning an Audi A6 Avant at some point.
It’s the type of car that feels right at home in such settings, combining practicality with aspiration. Not only do you get the sought-after Audi badge, and the premium feel that comes with it, but also a healthy dose of space in the rear seats and a massive estate boot, so that the whole family can come along on days out.
Of course, it’s not alone in this part of the market. Big estates are traditionally Volvo’s prime territory, and while the Swedes recently had the slightly odd idea to bail out of estates altogether, they soon saw sense, bringing the big V90 back, albeit limited to plug-in hybrid form.
Audi’s biggest competition, therefore, comes from its compatriots. Mercedes-Benz and BMW are both big players, too, with the E-Class Estate and 5 Series Touring seen as classy, highly desirable alternatives to the A6 Avant.
How practical is it?
Unfortunately, the A6 Avant doesn’t get off to a great start, because its boot is surprisingly small by class standards. Even the front-wheel-drive versions can’t come close to matching their rivals, with a fairly unremarkable 503-litre boot volume. That means the boot is actually less roomy than the previous-generation A6, which squeezed in 565 litres.
Choose the diesel engine, and you get even less, thanks to the installation of the mild hybrid battery beneath the boot floor; at 466 litres, the boot space on offer here is well behind rivals like the BMW 5 Series Touring and Mercedes-Benz E-Class. In fact, you'll find more space in the boot of a Volkswagen Golf Estate.
Opt instead for the plug-in hybrid (PHEV) version, and that figure drops further still, to a paltry 404 litres – not much more than you’ll find in a Renault Clio.
There’s better news further forward, where rear seat passengers get the benefit of a vast amount of leg room. There’s plenty of head room, too, and the long, wide-opening rear doors make it relatively easy to buckle up child seats. Just note that carrying a third person in the back seat means somebody needing to straddle a huge transmission tunnel running up the centre of the car.
Also note that both front and rear seats are mounted quite low in the A6, which means if you have to deal with limited mobility, you might like to choose something that sits a little higher up.
Up front, storage is taken care of via a big lidded bin beneath the central arm rest, plus a (rather small) glove compartment and door bins. Within the chunky centre console there’s also a cupholder and a slot for charging your mobile phone.
The front seats themselves are comfortable and suportive, just as they should be for a car so capable of covering big distances.
What’s it like to drive?
There are three powertrain options in the A6 Avant, all four-cylinder, and all with a seven-speed S Tronic automatic gearbox.
First up, there’s a conventional 2.0-litre petrol engine (badged TFSI) with front-wheel drive; a mild hybrid 2.0-litre diesel engine (badged TDI) with ‘quattro’ four-wheel drive; and a four-wheel-drive PHEV, (badged e-hybrid), which sees the 2.0-litre petrol engine aided and abetted by an electric motor that’s fed by a 20.7kWh (usable) battery. This latter powertrain allows the A6 to travel up to 63 miles under electric power alone.
Both the 2.0 TFSI petrol and 2.0 TDI Quattro have an identical maximum power output of 201bhp, though the diesel offers more torque and delivers it lower down the rev range, which means it’ll feel punchier, especially when it’s laden. This, along with the fact the diesels are four-wheel drive, which gives them greater traction pulling away, means the diesel A6 Avant gets to 62mph in 7 seconds flat, whereas the petrol engine takes 8.3 seconds.
The PHEV, meanwhile, gives you 295bhp to play with, and sprints to 62mph in just six seconds, before topping out at 155mph (vs 147mph and 149mph top speeds for the diesel and petrol models respectively).
We haven’t been able to drive either of the petrol models yet, but we have got our hands on a TDI diesel, though the car may not be perfectly representative of the whole range. That’s because it was fitted with the optional air suspension, as well as 21-inch wheels with super low-profile tyres. It's a combination that works well, with the A6 generally feeling very smooth to drive, particularly on the motorway. Whether this would be the case if you had the big wheels without the optional air suspension is another matter.
Chances are that when it’s fitted with chunkier tyres and smaller wheels, the A6 Avant should ride well enough, although note that the suspension on S Line models is firmer than on entry-level Sport spec cars.
In general, the A6 Avant is at its best on longer schleps, with engine noise even in the diesel dying away to a gentle background hum; wind and road noise are well suppressed, too. The mild hybrid system also allows for a suprising amoount of engine off running at low speeds which can help with refinement, although we did notice some juddering from the system at low speeds when steering lock was applied - not really what you'd expect in such an expensive car.
On the plus side, the A6 Avant is incredibly sure-footed when the road becomes a bit more winding. All that traction means you can point the steering wheel in the direction you want to go and floor the throttle, and in general, the A6 will sort everything out and bolt off down the road. True, this big Audi never quite crosses the threshold into being fun, but as a tool for covering big distances it's still pretty great.
Technology, equipment & infotainment
The A6 line-up kicks off with the Sport version, though don’t be too fooled by the name; this is the entry-level A6 Avant and the most affordable. Even so, it comes with a decent amount of equipment, including adaptive LED headlights, adaptive cruise control, alloy wheels, satnav, heated front seats, four-zone climate control, multi-colour ambient lighting, satellite navigation, a 10-speaker sound system with a subwoofer, wireless phone charging, 360-degree parking cameras, and a huge suite of safety and security features.
With that in mind, you might wonder why you’d bother upgrading to the S Line spec. And the only real reason to do so is if you really want the bigger wheels, stiffer suspension, chunkier bodykit, and sportier front seats.
Or you can take things a stage further with the top-of-the-range Edition 1 trim level. This gives you the S Line specification, but with even larger wheels, blacked-out exterior chrome, red brake calipers, an additional touchscreen display for the front passenger, microfiber interior inserts, and an enhanced cruise control system with lane centring.
Choosing this specification brings the total number of screens on the A6’s dashboard to three. The passenger-facing screen will allow you to watch videos from streaming platforms and play games en route, or it can be set to display a static screensaver or turned off completely if it isn’t being used.
It’s the central touchscreen infotainment system that you’ll spend most of your time using if you’re the driver. This is a huge screen that hasn’t quite been seamlessly integrated into the dashboard’s design, and while it works OK most of the time, there are some functions that feel a little labyrinthine to access. (The third screen is the virtual cockpit, which sits ahead of the driver and displays all the usual driving information — and does so pretty well).
You do get Apple Carplay and Android Auto, and these are well integrated with sensible resolutions that make the on-screen icons large and easy to press.
You don’t, however, get physical controls for the heating and ventilation, or even a separate control panel; instead, the climate control is adjusted via a big, permanently displayed ‘taskbar’ along the bottom edge of the screen.
This is better than having the controls hidden three layers deep within a menu but it can still be fiddly and a little distracting to use. A proper set of physical knobs – such as the ‘Smart Dials’ you’ll find in the A6’s more proletarian cousin, the Skoda Superb, would be much easier to use.
Audi A6 Avant running costs
Pricing for the A6 Avant starts from just over £53,000, which is good news because it means the A6 undercuts both the BMW 5 Series Touring and the Mercedes E-Class Estate – the latter by a quite significant margin.
Mind you, it’s a different story if you’re going for the plug-in hybrid version – in which case, the Sport model’s starting price of almost £64,000 is actually bested by the BMW 5 Series Touring, which comes in at almost £2,000 less.
What’s more, the A6 e-hybrid has a far higher official emissions tally than the BMW 530e, which means it’ll cost significantly more in company car tax – almost double, in fact. That’s despite the BMW offering up an identical power output.
Of course, the plug-in hybrid’s fuel economy will depend heavily on how much charge is in the battery, but Audi reckons it’ll manage about 40mpg even when the battery is completely flat.
Meanwhile, the pure petrol model should manage 30-35mpg in the real world – which isn’t brilliant, and will probably be a few mpg behind those mild hybrid petrol rivals we mentioned earlier.
As you’d expect, the diesel model will be more efficient, and this version does get mild hybrid technology – but it’s then hampered by the fact it’s only available with four-wheel drive. Expect to see around 40-45mpg on average in the real world, then, but again, you’ll get slightly better fuel economy from the two-wheel-drive Mercedes-Benz E220d.
Service schedules on the A6 Avant are the same as any other petrol, diesel or hybrid Audi, which is to say that there are two options: a fixed and a flexible regime. The flexible regime allows for oil servicing based on the oil degradation, which is monitored by sensors in the car. The car will then tell you when it needs servicing, up to a maximum of every two years or 18,600 miles. Alternatively, you can have your A6 Avant set to a fixed servicing regime for greater peace of mind. Under this system, servicing is carried out every year or 9,300 miles, whichever crops up first.
Audi A6 Avant reliability
It’s still too soon for us to have any concrete information on the reliability of the A6 Avant. But we can glean some rough information based on the previous model, which used versions of the same engines, and Audi’s reputation as a whole.
The news is not good. The last-generation A6 came third-from-bottom in its category in the 2024 What Car? Reliability Survey. Audi as a brand didn’t fare all that much better, finishing 24th out of the 31 manufacturers to have been featured in the survey.
And it’s not as if you have a lengthy warranty to help mitigate that sub-par reliability rating. The A6 Avant comes with a warranty of only three years or 60,000 miles, whichever crops up first. That’s about the bare minimum you’d hope for in this day and age.
- The A6 Avant is a safe car, with solid adult and child occupant protection scores in Euro NCAP crash tests (of 87 and 88 per cent respectively). The A6 also obtained good scores for its protection of vulnerable road users and its safety assist systems, leading to an impressive overall score of five stars.
- There’s also an all-electric Audi A6 Avant, called the A6 Avant e-tron. Surprisingly, though, the e-tron isn’t an electric version of this car. In fact, it’s a completely different car, based on a completely different platform – it just shares the same name. The reason is that the combustion-engined A6s were originally going to be known as the A7, under a new naming strategy which dictated that petrol and diesel cars would have odd-numbered badges (which is also why the Audi A4 is now the Audi A5), but which Audi decided to revoke just before the car was launched. So if you want your A6 as an electric car, check out our A6 e-tron review, linked above.
- Where most of its rivals now use mild hybrid petrol engines, the A6’s petrol option is more old-fashioned, and doesn’t boast any sort of hybridisation. That’ll make it a little thirstier.
- If you want the best all-rounder: Go for the Sport model with the 2.0-litre diesel engine. Granted, you get four-wheel drive, which you probably won’t really need, but the diesel engine is the most economical, and the Sport version is the most affordable and comes with all the toys you’d really want. The downside is that because you have to have four-wheel drive, you also get a sub-par amount of boot space.
- If you want the most boot space: Stick with the Sport model for the reasons mentioned above, but choose the 2.0-litre petrol engine instead. You’ll have to live with using more fuel, but the additional 37 litres in the back mean this is the most capacious A6 Avant.
- If you want all the toys: The Edition 1 e-hybrid is the one to have, though keep in mind it’ll cost you just over £70,000 – and there’s still an extensive options list with which you can bulk up that price further still.
- If you’re choosing a company car: The Sport e-hybrid is the version that’ll cost you the least in terms of company car tax. The e-hybrid model sits in the lowest BIK band of any in the A6 range, while the Sport model will have the lowest P11D value.
