Wagon without a hitch

If your car-purchasing motives include impressing the boorish burghers of the County Orange, there are plenty of flashy cars at the $50,000 price point that bounce the needle more.

The A6 Avant is a car for people with money who would really rather not make an issue of it -- your anonymous-opera-benefactor types.

It's also quietly gorgeous. Redesigned for 2006 and just hitting the market, the station wagon has a newly sleek skin that looks curried by the wind, a restyling that buffs out any linearity of the previous design, which wasn't exactly boxy to begin with. All the exterior detailing is vacu-formed, sucked into the bodywork: The glass and polished window surrounds are nearly flush; the door handles are embedded into the sheet metal; the lighting instruments (including the new LED tail lamps) wrap around like a military contractor's sunglasses. With its tapering glass canopy and converging rays rising from the rocker panels, the car has the same fluid geometry and organized energy of a Zaha Hadid building, not hugging the ground but hovering just slightly above it.

I can't think of a luxury car with a better sense of the moment. Exhibit A is the fact that Audi will sell the car in the United States only with a 3.2-liter, 252-hp V-6 motor -- reversing a long-standing trend among European carmakers of exporting cars with the biggest motors they can stuff under the hood (the sedan is available with a 4.2-liter V-8).

As gas prices remain stubbornly stuck around $3 per gallon, and with worse likely to come, I expect we'll see the horsepower wars become more of an indexed competition between output and efficiency. The A6 Avant -- a five-passenger, two-ton, all-wheel-drive estate -- gets 19 miles per gallon city and 26 highway. A small turbo-diesel could add five miles or more to each of those numbers.

Equipped with direct-fuel injection, variable induction and variable-valve timing, the Audi's humming V-6 reaches its maximum torque (243 pound-feet) at mid-throttle (3,250 rpm) and keeps pulling. But due to the fuel-saving algorithms of the six-speed automatic, the transmission frequently short-shifts into higher gears, which can give the car a kind of dead-stick feel. You have to switch over to the tranny's Sport mode or pick your gears with the steering wheel's manumatic paddles to bring the car to life. Properly coaxed, the car can reach 60 mph in 7 seconds and reaches its harmonic stride at three-digit speeds.