2016 #Audi TTS

Audi’s TT has never been a car for everyone. But now it’s tough to know if it’s a car for anyone.
It’s in an existential crisis, a tiny high-style coupe adrift in an ocean of SUVs. And now, with the 2016 TTS coupe, it has 292 horsepower with which to explore the boundaries of being and nothingness.

Much of what turns the TT into a TTS is the same stuff that twists an A3 into an S3, or Volkswagen’s GTI into a Golf R. That includes the higher-performing ­version of the group’s turbocharged and direct-injected 2.0-liter iron-block four-cylinder. Running its own cylinder head, pistons, turbocharger, higher-pressure fuel-injection system, and other tweaks that separate it from more-plebeian versions, this four is beastly.


Odd that the TTS’s manual-transmission shifter has markings for P, R, N, and D but no gear numbers. How embarrassing for Audi.
But while the TTS engine’s 292 horsepower is 72 more than the 220 in the regular TT, its 280 pound-feet of peak torque is only a tame 22 pound-feet stronger than the base TT’s. And that torque peak comes later—1900 rpm instead of 1600—and runs out longer, to 5300 rpm instead of 4400. It takes merciless throttle usage to get maximum thrust from this engine. Feather-foot it and it’s just a base Golf rented at the Antwerp airport.

A dual-clutch, six-speed automatic transmission (S tronic in Audi-speak) running closer ratios than in the regular TT is mandatory. The computerized shifting is impeccable, and it’s slick when shifted with the paddles, but it’s no manual gearbox. It’s inhumane that a more direct connection between the driver and his or her gears isn’t available in this car.

Arm the launch control, throw a rock at the accelerator, and hang on as the Quattro four-wheel drive sinks the optional 255/30R-20 P Zeros’ claws into the tarmac.

The TTS wallops 60 mph in 4.2 seconds, or 1.0 second better than the plain TT and 0.2 ticks quicker than the 80-pound-heavier Audi S3 sedan. This is a four-cylinder production car that runs the quarter-mile in 12.8 seconds at 108 mph, 0.7 second and 4 mph quicker than the old TTS.


Those big tires have teensy sidewalls, however, so to whichever mode you set the magnetic-ride shocks, there’s always spine-slamming potential. But turn-in is immediate, adhesion is immense (0.98-g skidpad twirl), and the TTS’s larger-diameter disc brakes may stop the universe’s decomposing entropy.

With a starting price of $52,825, the TTS sits alongside the purebred, mid-engined Porsche Cayman’s $53,595. The test car came in at a lofty $59,100. And there’s too much performance in genetically similar, cheaper, and more-useful cars such as the S3 and Golf R.

This third-generation TTS is often brilliant, but its style is a digressive comment on the deconstructed second-generation TT’s reinterpretation of the first generation. It’s all so meta—and unmoored from the market. The TT’s novelty is gone, though what remains drives great.