Would suit:
Posh middle-aged women from Chiswick.
Price:
£29 095 (R414 312), SA price R353 000.
Performance
240km/h, 0-100km/h 6.4sec
Combined fuel consumption:
7.60 litres/100km.
In a rare display of what, if you didn't know me better, could be mistaken for conscientious professionalism, this week I have arranged to test a direct rival to last week's car, the new BMW 3 Series Coupé.
This is an excellent chance for me to do some serious, What Car?-style, back-to-back testing of suspension dynamics, gasket tolerances, brake-differential seismology and so forth. But, before I ready my slide rule, a little background.
The original Audi TT is generally held to be a 20th-century design icon, like the Marmite jar. It was designed by current Ford design president J Mays and unveiled to gasps of wonderment at the 1995 Frankfurt auto show.
It changed the urban roadscapes of the western world for ever.
Such was the TT's influence that, for some years after it was launched, no manufacturer could countenance building a coupé that didn't have bathtub overtones and fiddly aluminium bits inside but the TT had its faults, chief among them that, beneath that startling retro-futurist styling, it was really just a VW Golf like your sister's.
Personally, I was more troubled by the fact that you couldn't see out of it, but my peers in the motoring journalism world clung to this dynastic dynamic dissonance like terriers to a punctured football, complaining incessantly that the TT didn't "handle" like a proper sports car.
Audi tried to placate them by fitting what is still the best paddle-shift gearshifter in the world but they wouldn't have it. If you were a proper man you bought a BMW 3 Series Coupé; TTs were for metro-homosexuals, they said, to which demographic I would add angry, posh, childless, middle-aged women from Chiswick (although that's just my own, empirical observation).
But what of the new one? Well, I will come clean and admit that, if I really were a dedicated, disciplined professional, I would have got hold of the 3.2-litre V6 which is more of a rival for the road-ripping BMW 335i I tried last week.
Instead, I opted for the 2.0T FSI which costs six grand less but is a mere 0.7sec slower to 100km/h and will account for 60 percent of sales in the UK.
It looks virtually the same - sleeker, sexier and, as is the regrettable way of the motoring world these days, "more aggressive" than the old car - and I suspect it is the nicer car.
Sounds like a Micra
The V6 has all-wheel drive and, obviously, more power, but the two-litre turbo is lighter, particularly over the front wheels, and, frankly, 147kW ought to be enough for anyone. It was for me.
Though the turbo engine - from the Golf GTi - makes a noise like a Nissan Micra it accelerates with a pleasingly alarming verve, plus the odd steering-wheel wriggle just to let you know you are driving a proper sports car.
The smaller engine is free of any turbo hesitancy and I think is more appropriate to TT2's all-new, partly aluminium chassis; the whole thing weighs a miraculous 1660kg and feels soufflé-light on the road. It's a really, brilliantly, nice drive.
Exemplary interior
The old TT had microscopic back seats and the new one is barely any roomier.
As always with Audi, the rest of the interior is exemplary, except for the angle of the pedals which reminded me of old Alfa Romeos and made my ankles ache.
Which, I'm afraid, is about as What Car? as I get. - Independent, London