I’m no Snake Plissken. I’ve never been arrested, don’t have a single tattoo, and prefer my shirts with sleeves. I do have an eye patch, but I don’t wear it very often.
Where Mr. Plissken’s goal was getting in to and then back out of a dystopian, burning Los Angeles, I had already managed my escape. Now, it was time for the return. I’d just completed a day of wheeling in Audi’s newest and littlest (for America, anyway) SUV, the Q3. I was up in the scenic, quaint, and generally lovely town of San Luis Obispo, a place that surely felt a lot farther away from Los Angeles than 200 miles.
But that’s how far Google Maps said I had to traverse the morning of my return, back down to LAX to catch a noontime flight. It was to be a drive across some of California’s most lovely coastal scenery, a prospect clouded by LA’s ever-present traffic.
Plissken dodged gridlock with a glider in his first film, a submarine in the second. Me? I had something even more potent at my disposal: An Audi RS6.
For the uninitiated, the RS6 is a weapons-grade, 4.0-liter V8 making 621 horsepower and 627 pound-feet of torque, clad in a nondescript wagon shape. Looking with a bit more intent, though, reveals the 21-inch wheels wrapped in summer performance tires, plus the hulking fenders required to contain them.
The theme is definitely subtle muscle, further sold thanks to the Nardo Gray that this one had been sprayed. Pair that with black wheels and trim, and you have a vaguely ominous, thoroughly classy, and incredibly desirable means of escape. Or, in my case, reentry.
The prospect of spending three hours behind the wheel of this thing would normally be one of unmitigated joy, despite the traffic that I knew was in my future. This trip, though, was tempered with a bit of sadness. I figured this would be the last time I had a go in the car that is, to me, Audi’s most desirable still on offer.
But not for long. The last RS6s have rolled off the line in Germany, and so whatever’s left is whatever’s left. I’d better enjoy this, then.
To best mitigate the traffic situation, I planned to get up early, hitting the road around 5am to try and beat the worst of the sorry souls who drive into or through Los Angeles on an average morning. However, something woke me up at 2:30 and, after a few minutes of restless pondering, the promise of dark, open roads and 600-plus horsepower had me up and out of bed.
The car was waiting for me outside the hotel, staged to swallow my biggest suitcase with ease. (I’d brought along my full racing suit for my recent drive of Porsche’s 911 Cup.) 30 cubic feet of cargo space is the kind of practicality you won’t often find in a machine with this kind of potential velocity. Even BMW’s M5 Touring falls short, managing 27 cubic feet under the hatch.
That done, I grabbed a few murky photos in the valet area, then hit the road. First stop? Gas. The RS6 was at about a quarter tank, and that wouldn’t do. I swung by the closest Chevron, put in my card, started pumping, and immediately exclaimed something so profane I was glad that, at 3:55 am, there was nobody there to hear me. $6.19 a gallon was a bit of a shock coming from New York, where the same stuff costs about half that.
70-odd dollars later, I was back on the road and heading into the darkness. The route down from LA is sadly not the most exciting. You’d need to make a hell of a detour to make it truly enjoyable, and in my eagerness to get to the airport, I couldn’t wander ftoo far afield. That said, a route with long stretches on the highway punctuated by a few twisty bits felt just about ideal for an Avant that exists in the Germanic ideal of big speed on big roads.
The 101 and 154 are hardly the Autobahn, and the mélange of materials used to pave them drove some unpleasant noises and vibrations up through the stiffened chassis of the RS6. Its air suspension is actually quite compliant in Comfort mode, but those big wheels and low-profile tires with rock-hard sidewalls weren’t fitted to minimize NVH.
So I simply turned up the excellent Bang & Olufsen sound system and settled in. I started with some mellow tunes, a mix of mostly Kruder and Dorfmeister, an appropriately chill Germanic soundtrack for cruising down the California coast hours before sunrise.
On the highway, the RS6 is as effortless as any other Audi, with adaptive cruise control and active lane-keep, meaning I could sit here and ponder the interior. The dash with the carbon-look weave and satin aluminized trim looks classy, and while the dual-screen MMI system has always felt a bit discordant, the more I see of Audi’s current line of interiors, the more I miss this generation.
Everything looks and feels great, and while I could do with a lot less piano black plastic, I greatly miss the physical controls that Audi scattered across the steering wheel here. This generation of Virtual Cockpit, too, offers far more configurability and capability than what they’re slapping in current cars. So much for progress. Concept C and its complete interior re-think can’t come soon enough.
Few modern cars offer the feel and aggression of this thing, too. Tapping the RS button on the wheel (which really should have been red) turns this Avant into a far angrier animal. On the highway, it might as well be an EV, its V8 is so silent. But after you hit the button, it clears its throat and is suddenly the perfect accompaniment to your rowdier driving.
Despite its 5,000 pounds, the RS6 is still a joy through narrow, twisty canyon lanes. The steering is quick and eager, and the grip prodigious, even when encountering an unexpected spray of mid-corner gravel.
The brakes are likewise sharp, so much so that this thing is difficult to bring to a smooth stop. I had planned on mentioning that as a mark against, but at one point on the PCH, just coming out of Malibu, some indecisive soul couldn’t choose whether to stay on or get off. Instead, they simply stopped in traffic. The RS6’s too-quick brake pedal saved me an uncomfortable conversation with Audi’s fleet manager that morning.
More awake now, chasing the orange crescent moon on the horizon, I decided to go up-tempo on the soundtrack. I switched over to Spiral Staircases from Alchemist, Curren$y, and Larry June, which I’ve been listening to on repeat since its release. Solo Driver seemed perfectly apt, though I wasn’t driving either a Spyder or a vintage Rolls.
Over the course of the drive, I kept thinking about this car’s demise despite it still feeling ripe for action, and those thoughts carried me back to my own lot in life, a freelance writer adrift with no safety net in an industry made more turbulent by the moment. It’s a bad time to be a journalist, dear reader, and the amazing journey that has been my career feels less certain than ever before.
Whenever I start feeling fatalistic, I throw on something stoic to add a little apathy to my mood. This morning, it was Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, my favorite Stoic work. If you’ve never read it, it’s a thoughtful discourse written by the most powerful, most wealthy man in the world, a literal Roman emperor telling you that you should be happy with whatever miserable lot you’ve been dealt in life.
For that reason and more, I don’t agree with all that he wrote. In fact, I disagree quite heartily with a good chunk of it, but he asks plenty of questions that make me think. I like listening to philosophy on long drives because thinking is all too easy to stop doing when you’re stuck in traffic.
It was about then that I made a slight detour over to US 1 in Malibu to see some of the devastation from last year’s fires, which my good friend Elana Scherr had reminded me of at the previous night’s dinner. 14 months later, it was still a terrible sight, dozens of people’s dream homes brought down to bare concrete supports.
It was a sad, sobering sight, and that was about the time I ditched Marcus Aurelius and switched over to something a bit more motivational. I’ve been spinning Alfredo II plenty since its release, and while there are perhaps fewer lessons I can apply to my own life on there, few performers can drop a cultural reference and make it significant like Freddie Gibbs.
I’d left so early that the dreaded traffic was no problem at all, so early that I had plenty of time for breakfast before I had to return my ride. I stopped at The Coffee Company with the goal of getting a bowl of oatmeal and collecting my thoughts for this very piece. But between the ashes of homes I’d seen and the AI-fanned embers falling onto my own industry, I figured it was a good time to stop pondering the John Carpenter-style dystopia and splurge on something a bit more decadent.
As I sit in the driver’s seat of the RS6 now, stomach full of pancakes, typing out these last few sentences before handing over the keys, I’m still a bit melancholy. This’ll probably be my last time in an RS6 Avant, at least one like this. I’m sad I never got a chance to drive one in its element, on the Autobahn with enough speed to challenge its twin-turbo V8.
But most of all, I’m thankful that I ever had a go at all. And that’s probably the most important lesson: Enjoy what you can while you can. And when you no longer can, be only glad that you did.