I'm strongly considering making a big change in the type of car I drive. Rehashing a bit of a post from last week (or maybe the week before?), but I'll keep it quick.
I'm currently in a CLS, which is basically a four-door-coupe version of an e-class. The cars I was looking at were an E-400 wagon and then a RS6 Avant. They were too small for big me.
The S3 fits me amazingly well, so I started looking at smaller cars.
Checked out the M340i (too cramped for shoulder room) and M2 (I couldn't even fit in the carbon seats...my hip bones were wider than the seat bottom). The Mercedes CLA, C and AMG A45 weren't that comfortable, either. Plus the AMG A45 looks a bit boy-racer to me at this stage in my life.
Drove the Genesis G70. It feels too much like my current car, with a side of numbness and bit of blah. Great on paper, but the drive was so-so, although I was able to power slide a really controllable tail-whip, which was super fun. It just felt too much like my current car, but down 150hp or so. There just wouldn't be a point to it...all you could say was it was "nice" but it didn't make me smile. When I got back in my current 11-year-old car I liked it more.
Back to the S3. That thing was a mother-fataing blast to drive. Interior cabin room is honestly better than all the rest, with the exception of rear-seat headroom, which I'm just not that worried about. Nobody could sit behind me in any of the cars listed above, including the Avant and E-400, which still pisses me off, TBH. The S3 actually made me smile and got me super excited.
What I'm kind of wrestling with is, has anybody gone from a bigger luxury sport sedan to a smaller one? This is like dropping two or three levels. Is there something I'll miss about the bigger car? Right now I can't even figure out what a bigger car is for? Like, my Mercedes is 98.7% hood; the cabin of the S3 is truly more comfortable and it's two feet shorter, which is rad. Unless that length in a car is good, but I'm just not seeing why right now. What, exactly, is the point of all these luxury cars getting longer and longer as you move up the classes since the interior cabin doesn't get bigger?
Finally, the S3 doesn't have a heated steering wheel or ventilated seats, which is a bit of a downer, but those are the only two options it doesn't have that I'd miss. I think I can live with that without much bother.
Finally finally, when you load up and S3, you're now at A5 pricing, and from there you could probably talk yourself into an S5 quite easily. Seems like a guy should go for the A5/S5 at that point, but I don't think I want another big sedan. Which leads back to the question - anybody ever drop the "class" (for lack of a better term) of car you drive and did you regret it?
Here's something, too: You could buy two S3s for the price of one RS6 Avant. So while the S3 is expensive, it's way cheaper than where I was when I started this little journey.
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