• Clever touches to aid practicality
• 495 litres of boot space with rear seats in place
• Rear seats don’t fold completely flat

How much space is there?

If you belong to a typical UK-sized family, the Audi A4 Avant is perfectly sized for you. It’s spacious in the front, with wide opening doors and lots of seat adjustment. Four adults will have plenty room to travel, with generous knee and legroom in the rear.

If you have have kids, and need to cart around their paraphernalia, the A4 Avant is an estate car that will take baby seats, carrycots or pushchairs without any problems at all.

A fifth passenger might struggle in the middle seat, but that’s no different to any other mid-sized estate in this class. Audi’s dark trims and fixtures may leave rear-seat passengers feeling a little claustrophobic, though.

Boot space and storage

Raise the powered tailgate and watch as the luggage cover slides up automatically revealing a 495 litres of superbly-trimmed load bay. That beats the Mercedes-Benz C-Class Estate by 15 litres and the BMW 3 Series Touring by 10. However, it’s not as spacious as the load bays found in the Volvo V60 or Peugeot 508 SW.

Fold the split rear seats forwards – they don’t lie completely flat for outright flexibility – and you’ll unlock 1,510 litres of space. Again, it’s 10 litres more than the BMW and exactly the same as the Meredes-Benz.

Safety

• Five-star Euro NCAP crash test rating
• Wide array of driver assistance systems available
• Security of Quattro remains a significant draw

There’s a vast range of Audi A4 Avant safety systems available making it one of the most secure cars in this segment to be in if you’re unfortunate enough to be involved in an accident, as evidenced by its five-star rating when tested by the experts at Euro NCAP.

One of the A4 Avant’s most impressive safety features is the Driver Assistance package with adaptive cruise control. Not only does it maintain a set gap to the vehicle in front, the system also reacts to changes in speed limits, raising and lowering the set speed accordingly. Furthermore, it uses sat-nav information to reduce speed – braking where necessary – for bends in the road, even when there’s no vehicle in front to react to.

We were particularly impressed with the clarity of the optional head-up display function, delivering pin-sharp graphics to be displayed on the windscreen directly in the driver’s eye line. It’s neatly integrated on top of the dashboard too, not looking as cumbersome as rival systems.