exigence

(I apologize for posting in two separate subforums, but as there is more traffic here, and as I'd also be looking at the A7, I wanted to post this here, also. Mods, please lock the other if need be?)

A couple years back, I had posted on this forum about looking at an S5 and, to a lesser extent, the A7/S7, as a move from my current Mercedes S coupe, and I got some great feedback.

Since then:
- The MB S coupe has been discontinued;
- The MB E coupe is rumored to be discontinued after MY23;
- Who knows what the MB "CLE" coupe will be like;
- The S5 was fun but not for me;
- I test drove a BMW M 8-series coupe and found it wasn't for me;
- I realized I have a soft spot for the A7/S7 more so than the A5/S5.

Could anyone speak to the NVH/livability of the 2020+ A7 or S7 in terms of comfort/ride and interior quietness, with or without the dual-pane glass on S7 Prestige models, or share any general observations on the cars in general, especially if you've spent any time in or cross-shopped the above?

TIA.

mattsrs

I recently bought a 22 A7 Prestige with luxury package and it has pleasantly impressed me. I picked A7 because of the rather unique design and being rare (you don't see many on street) . I did not cross shop with the cars you mentioned but I had a Lexus ES350 which I traded in and also have a Porsche Cayenne. Interior fit and finish and refine-ness of the engine/transmission is on par if not better than the Porsche. Interior is super quiet and very very well insulated. Suspension is not as soft as Lexus but it is a good thing because otherwise would feel boaty. A7 is comfortable yet controlled when it comes to handling. Technology of the car is solid too... from the quality of the screens to the overall MMI software it is great and modern. My only gripe is not having air suspension (available on S7) or adaptive suspension (available with 21" wheel but I didn't want to deal with issues of a larger wheel). Overall, happy with my decision and the car so far. Minor issues I noticed is lack of parking break auto hold (e.g. auto holding the break at a traffic light) and lack of remote starts but I can live without those. Hope this helps!

exigence

It does help - thank you! Touches on some of the things I'm not sure about and would have a hard time finding out before buying the car since difficult to find one around me to test drive.

Anyone else with any insight?

superswiss

Try to rent one, for example on Turo, to experience it for yourself. That's what I've done in the past, because a dealership test drive is often too short to really experience a car anyway. I have lived in both the Audi and Mercedes-Benz world, and I could get into it in detail, but my perspective is likely not gonna help you, because I mainly daily drive the performance models complete with sports/bucket seats, so the cars on your list are boring, numb and soulless for me, but I have driven almost everything on the Audi side from an A3 all the way to the R8 on different occasions. Audi had a pilot program here in San Francisco for a couple of years called Audi on Demand through which one could pretty much rent any Audi and I used them frequently to drive different models, either because I had a temporary need for something more practical or wanted to extensively test drive a particular model like the R8 for example. I've had Audis for over 10 years, but switched to Mercedes, specifically AMG three years ago when I bought my current 2019 C63S coupe. Also getting discontinued after this generation along with the E Class coupe and supposedly replaced with the rumored CLE. In the meantime I've pretty much driven all other AMGs at different track events, and regular MB models as loaners, so pretty familiar with both worlds.

Here are a few thoughts, but consider where I'm coming from in terms of the kinds of cars that I drive. I just recently lived with a 2022 A6 for 3 weeks while on vacation in Europe, so the experience is still fairly fresh and it's practically the same car as the A7. I drove it for a total of ~4000 km. A few years ago I also considered the S6 back when it still had a V8, but it was also just to numb and floaty for me.

• This particular A6 was a V6 diesel and fairly loaded. It didn't have adaptive suspension, but was equipped with all the driver assistance features. I don't recall a 100%, but pretty sure it had 19" wheels. Definitely fairly tall sidewalls. I'm not a fan of diesel engines, but they do have a lot of torque and therefore it moved quite well. Drove it on the German Autobahn and it had no issue reaching speeds in excess of 200 kph. Despite being fairly soft, it still felt confident driving at those speeds.
• I actually enjoyed it as a travel car, even though it wasn't very rewarding or interesting to drive. It was very quiet, which was a good thing, so I didn't have to listen to the tractor noise from the diesel engine and the mild hybrid system turned off the engine at every opportunity it got, so waiting at traffic lights etc. was peaceful and restarting the engine was very smooth. I always turn off auto start/stop in my AMG, because I wanna hear and feel that engine, but with cars like the A6 I wanna leave it on in order to not hear the less than satisfying engine noise. I'd take this V6 diesel over the 2.0T 4 banger in the US A6/7 any day, though. I find the 2.0T terrible. Not enough displacement, so it's a dog off the line and has a turbo hole the size of Texas. That's compared to my biturbo V8 in my AMG with the turbos nestled inside of the Hot-V with very short piping and fast spooling, so pretty much zero lag and power delivery close to a naturally aspirated engine. The 2.0T in comparison off the line barely moves and then when the turbo kicks in you get a disproportional surge. I hate this.
• The biggest issue with modern Audis is probably the transmission programming. Audis transmissions only have two modes, D and S whereas most MBs have at least three. My AMG has five. Not saying more modes are necessarily better, but D in Audis is practically an Eco mode and only good for grandma style driving. It stays too long in the high gears to keep the engine revs low and the result is that the car barely gets out of its way when you need to move. Just merging into traffic is a frustrating experience in D. So one constantly ends up toggling between D and S. Basically have to put it in S to get moving such as merging into traffic etc. and then you can put it back in D once you are cruising. But this is a major complaint from many current Audi owners. Mercedes has much better transmission programming and I'm not even specifically talking about AMG. Even the C 300 loaners I have at times always seem to be in the right gear even in Comfort mode.
• Lastly a few words about the tech in these cars. IMO, the Mercedes tech is just much better than current Audi tech. I don't have MBUX in my C63, but I have the latest COMAND NTG 5.5 system that uses the same Mercedes me connect backend as MBUX instead of the old mBrace. Same essentially as the facelift S Class. Don't know what year your S Class is. I find it superior to the MMI. One of the most frustrating things with the MMI in this A6 was the touchscreen. It's horrible frankly. To operate it while driving, even with a softly sprung car like this ends up being a target practice with eyes off the road. I caught myself several times being distracted trying to make something happen in the UI. I know MB is going in the same direction, but IMO touchscreens don't belong in cars. I mostly used CarPlay and Google Maps for navigation. Wireless CarPlay was kinda nice, but I still had to plug in my phone for charging to avoid draining the battery, so the benefit was mixed. This car didn't have the wireless charger. However, the touchscreen operation is inconsistent between the MMI functions and CarPlay. To operate the MMI functions you have to physically push the touchscreen. The idea is to get haptic feedback, but once inside of CarPlay you just need to touch the screen and not actually push it. Made no sense. I vaguely remember that the haptic feedback can be turned off, but I didn't bother since I was mainly in CarPlay anyway.
• Still on the technology front depending on whether driver assistance features are important to you. They are for me as I frequently do long trips and they are nice in stop&go traffic, too, for a less frustrating experience. Same as with the Infotainment system, MBs driver assistance features are just much better. The safety features as well. Audis have too many false positives. A common complaint with Audis is that when you are backing out of your driveway for example or while parallel parking it may slam on the brakes for no good reasons. There might be a car nearby, but often it's not likely to actually cross into your path or it's a total overreaction. This has never happened to me with any MB so far. I sometimes get a visual and acoustic warning to let me know there's a car nearby, but slamming on the brakes only happens if really necessary. Other safety systems like blind spot monitoring is also subpar in Audis. I don't really need blind spot monitoring as I adjust my mirrors based on the SAE method which eliminates blind spots, but the Audi system I find particularly useless. The placement of the warning light on the housing is not prominent enough and there is no acoustic warning. MB places the warning light in the mirror itself and also warns acoustically the moment you signal for a lane change and there's a car in the blind spot. I have to admit despite having properly adjusted mirrors it did actually safe my bacon a few weeks ago. I was distracted and didn't notice the car next to me, but the acoustic warning immediately got my attention.
• As for driver assistance, what I particularly like about MB is that they separate lane keep assist from active steering assist and they can be individually turned on/off. I have LKA turned off for example, but I use active steering assist, which is only active at the same time as DISTRONIC. So this as you may know drives and steers the car in stop&go traffic as well as at highway speeds. Works quite well in my C63. These systems have improved over time, so if your S Class is a pre-facelift and you have DISTRONIC etc., it would be an older generation. I did European Delivery with my C63 so I drove it on many of the same roads as I did the A6, and the systems in the A6 are just kinda terrible. LKA in Audis is a sort of hybrid of LKA and active steering. When turned on it tries to keep you centered in your lane with limited success. There settings to make it more or less sensitive, but none of them particularly work well. And you can't have LKA separate from active steering. It's always either both or none. Below 40 mph or so it is a true congestion assistant and works somewhat ok, but above that speed it's kinda terrible. It particularly had a hard time entering construction zones getting confused with the temporary lane markers, jerking the wheel every time and almost steering me into the barriers. My C63 never had this issue. It correctly following the temporary markings. The Audi system was just overall exhausting, unless I was on a mostly straight open highway just eating up miles, but as soon as the lane markers got a bit more complicated, such as merging lanes etc. I had to remember to turn it off or I ended up fighting the steering.
• Ok, I guess this is getting longer than I thought, but one last point on the handsfree trunk opening in the Audi. On several occasions the trunk started closing on me while I was loading. Audi's implementation is too sensitive or something and it thinks you wanna close the trunk when just shuffling your feet near the bumper. I have the same feature in my C63, but this never happens. Although, I have heard from E Class wagon owners that it's an issue there as well.
• Oh one more thing. Traffic sign recognition worked poorly in the A6 as well. It often got the speed limit wrong and suddenly slowed down the car when adaptive cruise was engaged. I know the latter can be turned off, but I usually keep it on when in Europe, because of all the speed traps, so it was frustrating that it worked so poorly. This again worked nearly perfect with my C63 while I was cruising around Europe for 2 months. Here in the USA I have the automatic speed limit adoption for DISTRONIC turned off, but it's still nice that the speed limit shown in the dash is actually the correct speed limit.

Ok, well this turned into somewhat of an essay after all, but it goes back to my point that everybody is different and looks for different things in a car. Much of it has to be experienced first hand to really know. I do enjoy driving different cars to compare them and driving this Audi reminded me why I switched to Mercedes. I'll likely not go back to Audi, at least not as long as I can still buy an ICE.

exigence

@superswiss - thank you for the detailed breakdown! Interesting read. My S coupe is sadly from the mbrace days, before Mercedes Me. Not the greatest, and its iOS app was notoriously unreliable for awhile. Seems like much of that has improved, but I have little use for paying for a subscription now as am that far out. Have never minded COMAND across multiple versions and in previous Mercedes models, but it's hardly amazing. Would be happy to have MBUX.

What you've described is part of why I'm not 100% convinced of brand/make-switching for my next vehicle. In my admittedly limited time in Audis, and not A7s at that (none around me on Turo, I checked), they've always struck me as good cars these days. I don't think anyone could go wrong with an A7/S7, but the livability/UX and tech points you make also make me want to try and hold out a bit longer to see what this CLE may be like, or who knows what else, over the next model year or so. Not really a bad decision to be made, I feel like.

I've not driven a C63, but I did test a C43 a couple years back. A fun car but a bit too stiff for my purposes as am a little more on the "cushy" end of the spectrum for a daily driver.

Steve0913

I have a 2019 A7 Prestige with the acoustic glass. Quietness of the ride was one of my biggest reasons for the A7. It is phenomenal. A5/S5 can't compare with the A7/S7 with the smoothness and quietness, in my opinion. The wider wheelbase is night and day along with the smoothness. Also, I feel like the Audi quietness was more quiet than BMW, but nowadays with Plug-In Hybrids or E-Tron, they are far more quiet than the "Mild Hybrids" like the 2019. So you need to compare apples to apples (i.e. plug-in hybrids vs their own, or E-Trons vs EVs). All this to say, my C8 A7 Prestige is super quiet and smooth! And it felt the same between 2019 and 2020 versions.

irontmp

Hi, I was curious if anyone knows what an A7 service includes and what I am expecting cost wise. Is there anything out of the ordinary that should be changed such as transmission fluid etc? Thanks