“Didn’t he say they had only one of the new A8s?”

“That’s an A4, Dad.”

Some people will walk away at this point, refusing to even consider spending $85,000+ on a car that can be so easily confused with one costing less than half as much. A similar problem killed GM’s luxury car sales back in the second half of the 1980s. But, by walking away, are these buyers missing out on the best large luxury sedan on the market?

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Coupe – feminine noun. Cutting; cutting out; cut. According to the Oxford-Hachette French Dictionary at least, this is the definition of a word that always held special promise for car lovers worldwide. But the evocative nature of the term, and the fact that French is no longer the world’s lingua franca, have given today’s automakers license to apply the term to almost anything. If a car’s roof line even remotely resembles a rotten piece of a banana, it’s a coupe. Marketing, after all, is a more powerful force than grammar.

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It is said of Frank Lloyd Wright that he was an unbelievably annoying and offensive man; worse than that, every home he ever built ended up with a leaky roof. More than eight years ago, the first major gathering of North American TT owners took place, not at a racetrack or in the banal confines of a convention-center parking lot, but in the shadow of Wright’s residential masterpiece, Fallingwater. It was an apt choice for an automobile which has chosen form over function since its introduction. Among the quartet of small German sportsters — Audi TT, Porsche Boxster, BMW Z, and Mercedes SLK — only the TT is a transverse-engined front-driver, only the TT is currently supplied in North America with a four-cylinder engine, and only the TT features rear seats, improbable as they may be. Those of us who remember the Sesame Street song “One of These Things Is Not Like The Other” will have no trouble picking out the Audi as the one which, indeed, is not like the others.

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Once upon a time, S was for Audis what M was for BMWs. A decade ago Audi took an A4, added a pair of turbos to the V6, stiffened the suspension, plus-oned the alloys, and tagged the result the S4. A special driving experience that became more special (if less moddable) when the 250-horsepower turbo V6 was replaced by a 340-horsepower V8 a few years later. The A4 was redesigned for 2009, and this year there’s a new S4. The V8 has been tossed in favor of a supercharged 3.0-liter V6 that kicks out 333 horsepower. Is the resulting car worthy of the S?

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After urbane styling and precise road manners  made Audi a real player in the luxury sports sedan market with the late ‘90s A6, the Ingolstadt Werkmeisters took a more conservative route with the third-generation A6. It became larger, more architectural than haute couture, and softer. For 2009, though, Audi decided to give the A6 an adrenaline shot right to the heart: a new engine that transforms this car from wallflower to stealth wildcat.

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The process of writing a car review often feels like creating a “Mad Lib”. TTAC readers old enough to have taken a long road trip in the pre-GameBoy era may remember Mad Libs; they are little booklets with blanks for nouns, verbs, proper names, and so on. One person comes up with the nouns and verbs, another person writes them into the blanks, and hilarity ensues. Car and Driver appears to be almost entirely written by Mad Lib nowadays, but those oh-so-seductive English big-format car rags aren’t above doing a little fill-in-the-blank action themselves.

One of the enduring lessons of the car game is that good vehicles don’t always sell well. As a car writer who took on news analysis before ever getting manufacturer-sponsored time behind the wheel, this lesson can’t help but tinge my impressions of a road test. So when my first weeklong tester arrived in the form of a Q7 TDI, I felt no desire to justify Audi’s decision to bring the thing to market. After all, by any reasonable analysis, the brand built by Quattro wagons should have been the primary beneficiary of America’s SUV craze. Or, at least its worst enemy. Instead the Q7 showed up for the party fashionably dressed but fashionably late. And very few wanted to buy it. With the high price of luxo ute party fuel already killing the festive vibes, is switching to a new drink enough to make Audi’s SUV sales party like its 1999?

On paper, the Audi A3 TDI is an exercise in futility. The model shares platform bits with a Golf Rabbit. It’s smaller than a Jetta Sportwagen. It carries a lofty price premium; the diesel-powered A3 “boasts” the same engine that can be had across the street at the Vee-Dub for thousands less. It’s not as fast, sporty or capacious as the rear wheel-drive BMW 335d. By any rational measure, the A3 TDI is an answer to a question that few Americans even thought about asking. Which is why it’s better to judge the A3 TDI “in the flesh.”

Audi is pitching its late-to-the-party Q5 against Lexus’ recently refreshed RX350. Audi’s ad men would have you believe that the Q5 buyer is making a forceful statement of individuality and taste—in contrast to the RX buyer’s safe, boring, follow-the-herd mentality. It’s a strange play during these times of economic certainty, but understandable. The Q5 is preaching to the choir. The majority of the Q5’s buyers will come from within the brand’s established audience, who consider Audi’s products the automotive equivalent of an Armani suit. Which makes the Q5 yet another fine young cannibal, preying on whatever sales the Q7 may have generated and stealing business from the gotta-have-an-A4-on-stilts crowd. Hang on. Whose product line is this anyway?

Throw out your copy of WardsAuto “Interior of the Year” awards. The Audi A5 with the S Line seats is four-wheeled Hammer time: the world’s best automotive interior. Nobody can touch the way this cabin looks, works, feels and smells. OK, when you use the Audi A5’s thumbwheel to scroll through your iPod tunes, if you don’t select a new tune within the allotted time, the menu reverts to the song playing, which could be six clicks back. Other than that, I can’t think of anything wrong with the A5’s cabin. Yes, even the dreaded MMI mouse thingie has won me over. If you want a reason to admire/buy/worship/savor the Audi A5 3.2 Quattro, there you go. Otherwise, well, I have issues. For example. . .

Imagine you’re looking for a $41k imported sports sedan. You want something fun to drive. Sayonara Lexus. You were traumatized by an orthodontist. Aloha to Acura’s tin grin TL. You appreciate the difference between having it and flaunting it. Auf wiedersehen BMW and Mercedes. That leaves the Audi A4 3.2 Audi and Infiniti G37 6MT. Oddly enough, I recently sampled those two exact cars. Funny how these things work out.

M, RS, V, F, AMG. The alpha alphabet represents five manufacturers’ best efforts to create something unique, exciting and memorable from their more prosaic mainstream motors. The resulting “performance tuned” sports sedans are so powerful, so capable, so versatile, that they’re the ground based equivalent of the all-weather fighter jets that battle for control of the skies. While the shibboleth “there’s no such thing as a bad car” applies here, there are always going to be winners and losers. And it’s our job to sort the wheat from the chaff.

60 Minutes nearly killed Audi in North America. After “Unintended Acceleration in the Audi 5000” aired in 1986, Audi sales dropped from 74k sales a year in 1986 to less than 12k by 1991. Sales remained constant until 1996, when Audi debuted a car that would finally tackle the BMW 3-series and the Mercedes C-Class head on. With its still unusual all-wheel drive system, classic German styling and interiors that set the industry standard, the A4 single-handedly revived sales in North America. An Audi fan since birth (when I was driven home in an Audi Fox GTI), I viewed them from afar; Roswell’s nearest Audi dealer lay eight hours away in Dallas. So I rejoiced when I signed the paperwork to purchase the first of the 5-valve V6 powered A4 quattros. Little did I know the next year would be filled with Germanic Sturm und Drang.

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Over the last few years, the last generation Audi A4 was growing increasingly stale. Updated offerings from BMW, Lexus, Infiniti, everyone but Volvo have overtaken Ingolstadt’s brot und butter model. To keep the faith– or at least the faithful– Audi’s engineers initiated a massive redesign of the A4. Obviously, it’s a better car. Vorsprung and all that. But can the new A4 leapfrog the luxury brat pack? Or is it more of the same? Yes.

Full disclosure: I really like Audis. I own two of them: an A4 Avant and an A4 Cabriolet. So when Audi offered me the chance to review a Q7, Ingolstadt's answer to "how late can you be to an SUV party and still not wonder why you bothered to show up in the first place," I said game on. After all, it's an Audi. What's not to like?