After another road trip with the PDK on some back roads on Sonoma Coast, I have to say it’s the most satisfying transmission ever. Sure it costs $14k to replace if you break it, but it’s completely awesome. The sound in the cabin is intoxifying when it rips off a shift near 8000 RPM without the chassis even taking note that a shift happened. There’s no weight transfer front-rear at all. Poor man’s GT3 all the way.
I’m not impressed with any MY2015 turbo motor. The Macan S is laggy. The C400 Mercedes is laggy. I’m not expecting the B9 S4 to have better technology than either of those. I’m even skeptical that the 991.2 base turbo can pull it off at the $90k price point (at 1800 RPM the lag is 3 seconds, at 2400 RPM it’s 2 seconds). If the RS4 does an electric turbo I think that could work better.
The iPad screens aren’t bad at all. I think it’s going to take a while to get Apple Car Play to market on them. I was playing with Android Auto last week and it’s totally not ready. When the car is in park it stayed in Hyundai UI mode, and only when it was in drive would it start to mirror the phone screen. You jump back and forth between the 2 interfaces and it’s really janky. Apple needs to support Android devices and Google needs to support Apple devices for these systems to be market ready. Basically the car relies on your device to provide the center stack experience. If you don’t have a paired device the manufacturer still needs to provide a default implementation so you can use the car.