2011 Audi A1 First Drive

Audi, go ahead and take our cherished ex-child pageant heartbreaker Justin Timberlake to do your celebrity lifestyle pre-launch marketing for your new big-volume car. Quote to us your estimated U.S. fuel mileage numbers in the damned press materials. Invite a few American hacks in to drive the wee one in Berlin. But Valhalla forbid that you should ever deign to export the 2011 Audi A1 for sale in North America.

Through the tree-thick former East Germany over many curve-starved roads, we have just driven around the impeccably put-together 2011 Audi A1. Based on the same chassis underpinning the maybe-for-North-America Volkswagen Polo — 2009 European Car of the Year and 2010 World Car of the Year — the new baby Audi (model "AU210") could hardly be anything but good driving material. We played hard with the current top-trim version, the 1.4 TFSI with its 121-horsepower turbocharged direct-injected 1.4-liter inline-4; it's like driving a nicely warmed-over A3, only smaller and tighter.

The U.S. and Canada do not get the Audi A1. The Germans always tantalizingly qualify this status with "not currently," but it would take a lot to convince Audi North America that it needs to bring over an Audi that's this small and doesn't currently offer all-wheel drive. What a bloody shame, too. The 2011 Audi A1 will definitely have both BMW and Mercedes moving forward the plans for their respective compacts; if the other two don't come out with something comparable soon, they're idiots. (And no, the Mini doesn't count as BMW's premium compact.)

Big Things Come in...
Positioning of the 2011 Audi A1 is pretty clear after a first drive. One intention is to compress several big-car touches from the Audi A8 into a compact layout. One echo of this design impulse is the latest LED headlight design for which Audi has become recognized and which the other Germans are now copying — and which we're also sort of getting tired of already. There's also the new hexagonal single-frame grille first used on the latest A8.

Inside, the touch surfaces are distinctly premium in heft and all the switchgear and stalk design is dedicated for the A1 (part of the sleeker new look we'll see on all Audis from here on). In the center stack area, the latest scaled-down version of the optional MMI onboard functionality is a direct carryover from the new design launched with the A8. Instead of cramming the MMI screen into the center dash as on all sub-A8 Audis, now the 6.5-inch screen pops up from the front shelf, thus separating functions and adding lots of clarity to the layout. The entire area around the driver cockpit now just looks better for it, too.