• Spacious enough for smaller families
• Impressive 480-litre boot
• Expands to 965 litres with rear seats folded

How much space is there?

People don’t generally buy medium-sized, premium-priced four-door saloons for their outright practicality, but the Audi A4 proves to be spacious enough for the needs of most smaller families. If you don’t fancy the estate-bodied A4 Avant, there’s also the five-door coupe A5 Sportback if you need a bit more flexibility than is on offer here.

Up front it’s roomy enough, but the rear seats are compromised for legroom. Note, too, that due to a large transmission tunnel running down the centre of the car, room in the middle seat in the rear is limited.

A Parkers top tip would be to spec the optional Storage Pack which adds nets to the back of the front seats, a lockable glovebox, a cup holder in the rear centre armrest, plus a bag hook, a 12v socket and a luggage net in the boot.

Boot space and storage

The A4’s boot space is up there with the best of its rivals thanks to a capacious 480 litres of luggage space with the rear seats in place, and 965 litres with them down. The load bay, although restricted by the smaller bootlid (when compared with the tailgate on the A5 Sportback, for instance) is usefully flat and square – perfect for sliding larger items in.

Plus, should you go to fold the rear seats down you’ll be pleased to note they operate with a 40:20:40 split, meaning the middle and two outer seats can be collapsed independently.

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Is it easy to park?

Although the A4 isn’t as tall or bulky as the related Q5 SUV or even the smaller Q3, don’t let that deceive you – it’s still a sizeable vehicle. Fear not, though, as all-round visibility is good, while standard-fit front and rear parking sensors mean it’s not hard to judge its extremities.

If that’s not enough, a rear-view camera, Top View (bird’s eye perspective of the car when parking) and automatic parking are all available for a little extra cash.

Safety

• Plenty of driver assistance systems on offer
• Five-star Euro NCAP crash test rating in 2015
• Four-wheel drive and matrix headlamps available

With 30 driver assistance systems, the A4’s safety is as impressive as any other model in the firm’s range, or indeed those of its rivals. Needless to say, it achieved the full five-star safety rating from European safety regulators Euro NCAP way back in 2015.

Every A4 gets LED headlights as standard, but the firm’s Matrix LED headlight option uses separately controlled lighting elements and reflectors to shut-off high beam when it detects other road users or other sources of light. It even uses GPS information to determine whether it should switch from left-hand to right-hand traffic illumination.

An optional head-up display means you don’t have to take your eyes off the road to absorb information on the move, plus the Quattro models have four-wheel drive to hopefully keep you away from a crash in the first place.

On the back seat you will find two Isofix child seat-mounting points. There’s plenty of space back there for them, just beware that the saloon bodystyle means you may have to bend down in order to install the seats – less easy than with an MPV or SUV.

Watch: Audi A4 Euro NCAP crash test video