Take another bow

IN 1995, Audi was hanging by a burning thread in the U.S. Thanks to some spectacularly bad cars and a meta-scandal concerning mysterious "unintended acceleration," U.S. sales of VW's luxury division had spiraled down to around 7,000 cars, and it was no feat to imagine Audi exiting the American scene with its Teutonic tail between its legs. The subsequent turnaround -- all those sexy and beautiful cars like the TT and the R8, the foundational leaps in technology such as direct injection, the eight wins at Le Mans, the toe-to-toe-ing with Mercedes and BMW, all of that -- began with the release of the Audi A4.

The A4 was Audi's iPod.

Among other things, A4 demonstrated VW-Audi's conception of vertically reinforced product development. In most car companies, the lab coat research and technology flow down from flagship products to cheaper mass-market cars, over the course of several years. With Audi, engineering exotica reliably migrates up the product chain as well as down.

In the 2009 Audi A4 -- due in dealerships in September -- the car's debt to more expensive siblings is obvious, from the robot-reptile stare of its LED headlights (first seen on the R8) to the tensed ligature of its styling and the sheer affront of its, well, front. The car is, and looks like, a four-door version of the new A5 coupe. But the car also features several systems that are virtually brand new, including the trick Audi Drive Select -- a system to incrementally sharpen the car's sporting responses (steering, transmission shift points, suspension stiffness). Other hot-off-the-workbench technologies: dynamic steering (providing small degrees of counter-steering correction as the car reaches the limits of handling); lane-departure warning; side-object warning system; automated cruise control.

Taken on its own, none of these systems is revolutionary, or even first to market. Put them all together and stuff them into a mid-size German sedan that, fully optioned, costs under $40,000 -- and make that sedan a model of holistic cool, utterly balanced, deeply charismatic, somehow inevitable -- and you have a car that can launch a second renaissance of Audi. And considering Audi spent $1 billion on what's called the B8 program, that's probably what it had in mind.

But first, the tale of the tape. Compared with the previous generation A4, the new car is 4.6 inches longer, 2.1 inches wider, over a wheelbase massively stretched by 6.5 inches. Like the A5, the A4's powertrain has been designed so that the front differential is situated between the engine and transmission, allowing the front-wheel centerline to be pushed toward the front of the car.