A4 with 19" wheels and sport suspension

[Donkey388]

Hi all, apologies for the basic question, this will be my first Audi ... 

I've placed a reservation on a A4 S Line with 19" wheels (1.4 TFSI S Tronic). 

I've read a few forums saying that the 19" wheels are horrendous for comfort (especially on UK roads), what are your thoughts?

Do you think I'll be better off waiting until I find an 18" with the spec I'm looking for? 

[Magnet]

Hello Donkey! ( well that’s a first),

Welcome to the forum. I think you are answering your own question by questioning your concerns. My questions are:- 

Are you buying this particular car because you like the look of it? 

Does your driving style warrant a better road holding harder type suspension, or would you prefer to have a more comfortable ride? 

If the latter, then if I were in your situation I would be seriously thinking twice about by a car with inherently harder sports suspension, leave along larger diameter wheels. 

The logic concerning larger wheels goes along the line of:- a car is designed to give a compromise between ride comfort and handling - often 17 inch wheels are the chosen design size, which allows a reasonable tyre profile ( ‘depth of sidewall’ in effect), so you end up with an outside diameter of wheel and tyre of x inches, and importantly, this has to remain the same. So you increase the wheel diameter to 18 inches, which means the ‘amount of rubber’ has to reduce so that the outside diameter remains the same. Increasing the dia. to 19inch decreases the rubber depth even more, and obviously has a detrimental effect on ride comfort. Ultimate bone shakers are those with say. 21 inch wheels and virtually little shock absorbing rubber, but 19 and sports suspension?? 

If you add to this, the much harder tyre sidewall construction of run-flat tyres ( now a very popular OE fitment on sports type suspension variants) then the ride situation gets even worse. 

Everyone to their own, but cars are often bought with lowered/harder suspensions and fancy big wheels, because they appear attractive to the passer-by. But the passer-by never rides in them, and the driver never sees the so called attractiveness of the car - from the inside- so is it all worth while!? 

Well worth having a good think.

Kind regards,

Gareth.

[Donkey388]

Hi Gareth, thank you for your response

I'm trying to find a used petrol automatic A4 which has heated seats and the virtual cockpit.

Annoyingly, pretty much every car I find comes with sports suspension and 19" wheels (although I've seen a handful with 18").

Do you have any advice around this? I'm certainly the type of person who'd prefer a comfier ride 

Do you know if there's much of a difference between 18" and 19"? (would it be noticeably much more comfortable) 

[Magnet]

It depends how important heated seats etc.(really) are to you. 

Some sound advice given to me many, many years ago when looking for a particular ‘extra’s pack’ with a secondhand model - without much success- was get your cheque book out and order a new one to the specification you want! 

So perhaps you can broaden your search and not exclude cars which don’t have the mentioned extras you want. Petrol vs diesel?? 

Of course, diesel has had some very bad (justified?) press, and we can anticipate that bad press will extend to petrol in the not too distant future, so does excluding diesel (really) make as much sense as we think it does? 

Kind regards,

Gareth.

[DavidGS]

I don't find the 19" wheels that uncomfortable to be honest. My main concern is not to chip the alloy wheels so a bit of care manoeuvring is needed at times.

[Smythy]

I have 20s with a stretched tyre on mine. drive on plenty of crap road and i don't find it particularly bad. the 20s look brilliant with the car and traction in savage. However I would advise good michelin pilot tyres. The have a different compound of rubber on the sidewall which makes a real difference with low profiles