Road test review: Audi A1 Citycarver
Tuesday, 14 July 2020
AUDI A1 CITYCARVER
Base price: $45,900
Powertrain and economy: 1.0-litre turbo-petrol three-cylinder, 85kW/200Nm, 7-speed automatic, FWD, combined economy 4.8L/100km, CO2 110g/km (source: RightCar).
Vital statistics: 4046mm long, 1756mm wide, 1459mm high, 2566mm wheelbase, luggage capacity 335 litres, 17-inch alloy wheels.
We like: Looks great, brilliantly eager little three-cylinder engine, ride and handing top-notch.
- We don't like: Expensive, too many hard plastic surfaces in the interior, what’s the point again?
Premium segment baby SUVs are the hot thing of the moment, with every carmaker scrambling to get into the segment with something both small and vaguely SUV-ish. While Audi has its funky Q2 and chunky Q3, there is always room for more, so now it has jumped into the jacked-up hatch faux-SUV arena with a butched-up version of the A1, oddly called the Citycarver.
So is this a sort of A1 allroad then?
You could be forgiven for thinking that, after all the Citycarver lifts its black plastic body cladding and jacked-up ride height straight from the allroad playbook, however, it is most certainly not an A1 allroad.
**READ MORE:
* Road test review: Audi A6 allroad
* Road test review: Peugeot 208 GT
* Audi announces pair of almost-off-roaders
**
Being identical under the skin to a boggo A1, the Citycarver is FWD only, with nothing allroad about it. Onlyroad, maybe, because even the tiny increase in ride height (40mm – 35mm from the suspension and 5mm from chunkier tyres) does literally nothing other than make it look a little tippy-toe-ish.
That said, the A1 is a good-looking little thing to begin with, so while it doesn’t really need that additional allroad-esque hints, they don’t exactly take anything away from it.
Audi New Zealand has positioned the Citycarver as its second-from-top model in the A1 range, sitting just below the S-Line in terms of price. This means at $45,990 it is rather expensive for a compact city car. Even a jacked-up one.
The Citycarver also sits $3,000 below the hefty asking price for the S Line and that difference does show up in equipment levels, with the Citycarver missing out on things you might reasonably expect from a $46k car, like a proximity key, adaptive cruise control, an immobiliser and Audi’s slick virtual cockpit display, all of which the S Line gets.
The S Line also gets the more powerful 110kW/250Nm 1.5-litre turbo engine with that price difference, while the Citycarver makes do with the admittedly excellent and characterful 85kW/200Nm 999cc turbo triple.
So the Citycarver comes off looking a bit lacking then?
Well, yes it does really.
And that opens the door on a far bigger problem for it that the rest of the A1 range faces to one degree or another – while it is a great looking little car that actually does nothing particularly wrong, it really doesn’t do anywhere enough to distance itself from the other thoroughly excellent cars that sit on the same platform in the wider VW Group range.
In that line up you have the excellent Volkswagen Polo which offers better levels of equipment for way less money. Hell, you can even buy the utterly superb 147kW/320Nm Polo GTI for a whopping $6,160 less than the Citycarver…
Any other cars I should consider?
Well, obviously a Polo GTI.
But the Seat Arona is an excellent small SUV alternative that comes with equipment levels closer to the A1 S Line and starts at just $29,990. Then there’s the Volkswagen T-Cross that likewise comes with better equipment levels and undercuts the Citycarver right across its entire range, including the top-spec R-Line which drops at a hefty $3,000 less than the Audi.
It’s not that the A1 Citycarver does anything particularly wrong, it's just that it is leaning very heavily on the prestige of its badge to justify it pricing.