Tested: 1982 Audi Quattro Photos
From the Archive: The arrival of Audi's original Quattro coupe brought with it high-living instruction on how to burn your candle at all four corners. We were suitably impressed.
From the Archive: The arrival of Audi's original Quattro brought with it high-living instruction on how to burn your candle at all four corners. We were suitably impressed. Read the full story here.
The original Quattro coupe was conceived, nurtured, and brought to fruition by one man, Ferdinand Piëch, and it set the tone for virtually every Audi performance car since.
Impressed with the 1982 Audi Quattro's breadth of technology and considerable refinement, we called it "a four-wheel-drive, turbocharged, intercooled, disc-braked, independently suspended, five-place package of high-styled civilization on wheels."
The 1982 Audi Quattro's turbocharged 2.1-liter inline-five made a decent-for-the-era 160 horsepower and 170 lb-ft of torque.
Weighing 3040 pounds, our '82 test car ran to 60 mph in 7.8 seconds and covered the quarter-mile in 15.8 seconds at 86 mph.
As an indicator of how far performance has evolved since 1982, note that some of today's diesel heavy-duty pickups can show their taillights to the Quattro in a drag race.
The 1982 Audi Quattro came with a standard five-speed manual transmission and, or course, Quattro all-wheel drive.
Back in the day, our Quattro test car averaged 17 mpg while in our hard-driving care.
The 1982 Audi Quattro was rather spacious inside but its trunk was comically small.
An actuator knob on the Quattro's center console could lock or unlock its center and rear differentials; locking the diffs helped improve its traction in adverse conditions but could hamper its handling on dry pavement.
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