Audi R8 Spyder 2010 road test
With a base price of £112,500, the R8 Spyder is not a cheap car to buy and, with a long list of options and customisable upholstery and trim, we’re sure that many owners will spend considerably more to spec their car up to make a statement. Running costs are also prohibitive for normal people, but if you can afford to buy an R8 in the first place, they shouldn’t be a problem. It’s almost academic to mention the official fuel consumption of 19mpg on the combined cycle (20.3mpg with the R tronic automatic gearbox) and C02 emissions of 356g/km (332g/km for the R tronic), with vehicle excise duty costing the maximum £435 a year. The one bright spot is that as the R8 Spyder is a strictly limited edition car (the allocation for 2010 is already sold out and availability for 2011 is also running out rapidly), so residual values will be very high indeed. Why you’d ever want to sell one, though, is beyond us.
The R8 Spyder is largely built by hand at Audi’s Neckarsulm plant, where the company boasts a fully automatic measuring system that checks the dimensional accuracy of each car body down to a tenth of a millimetre, using 95 laser sensors to check 220 points within five seconds. This kind of attention to detail comes as no surprise once you spend any kind of time with the car. It is superbly engineered, even for a supercar: every panel gap across the car is consistent, and the fit and finish are of the highest order. Even the canvas roof, with its intricate mechanism, can easily withstand some of the worst weather the British climate can throw at it. During our test, we had cause to close the roof hurriedly and drive through a heavy thundery shower: there wasn’t even the merest hint of any leakage through the snug-fitting canvas and the cabin stayed perfectly dry. As for reliability, the R8 won’t show up in any customer satisfaction surveys, but it’s highly unlikely that a product as exclusive as this, from a company with a reputation as good as Audi’s, will suffer too many problems.
- Read the full Audi R8 Spyder 2010 road test
- Audi R8 consumer car reviews
- Audi R8 lease prices
- Audi R8 new and nearly new
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