It is not too difficult to make a hatchback share some of the poshness of a saloon. Car companies are doing it in the factory all the time, but you could almost do it yourself at home, with an afternoon on your hands and the right tools. You stick a little leatherette around the seats, wire in a CD player, electrify the windows or the sun-roof. Hey, presto.
To make a hatchback which is itself a premium grade vehicle and which feels like a saloon, rather than a wishful imitation of one, is something else. But Audi has done, with the A3.
The A3 came out in 1996. It was the first time Audi had bothered to design a hatchback since the 1970s, having had bigger fish to fry. The company had been too busy developing and establishing its crushingly cool saloons, the estimable A4 and its big and highly unaffordable sister, the A8, which is the price of a three-bed room house in most areas. With those two models alone, Audi had successfully outmanoeuvred the opposition, making Mercedes look tacky and BMW look like producers of automobiles by appointment to the world's wideboys.
Audi seemed to have looked at the most important, decision-shaping consumer desirables within the saloon-buying market - ostentation and the potential for crude one-upmanship - and then to have performed a neat shuffle by appearing to distance itself from all that. It wouldn't do gimmicks and flashiness; it wouldn't be so vulgar as to compete . It would proceed by a kind of understatement - and it would say smart things about you if you joined it in this quest.
In fact (and this was neat), there was no better way to get one-up than by driving an Audi. There was no more ostentatious way to be uninterested in ostentation. The company appealed, in the shape of its cars and, very compellingly, in its advertising, to the buyer's inverted snobbery, which is, of course, the most enjoyable kind of snobbery of all. No car has looked down its nose at snobbery quite so successfully as the Audi A4.
The A3, with its quietly dynamic look, continued this important family tradition - and still does so in its new version for this year. It's a classy motor, in many senses, but mostly in the sense of middle-class. (So smartly does Audi play the class game that it's difficult to believe it is not a British company. It is, of course, a German one: witness one of the colour choices for the A3, "Denim Blue". The denim in question appears to be stonewashed.)
It is commonly the way with car relaunches that what distinguishes the new model from the original is a bold mix of the barely discernible and the completely invisible - a slightly bigger badge here, a somewhat smaller accelerator pedal there and, under the bonnet, some fine-tuning which will probably only be perceptible at 147mph, and only then if you are Damon Hill.
For most companies, what goes by the name of a radical cosmetic make- over is actually the equivalent of having a skin-tuck in your underarm: very few people are going to notice. Whether you find the new A3 blisteringly different from the old model will depend at least in part on whether the following alterations raise any hair on your neck. Or indeed your underarm.
It's changed the grille; it's made the front Audi badge a bit thicker; it's put in new light mouldings; it's made available a new set of alloys (five different designs); some of the airbags stay puffed up for longer, just in case you're in for that always disappointing second impact; it's found a way to get a few more miles per gallon out of a 1.6 engine; it's come up with a slightly different steering wheel.
That's the main points covered, I think. Apart from the new, easy-touch boot catch, which slings the back door up almost when you breathe on it.
But who could blame Audi for not wishing to strip the car down and begin again from scratch? It was too good a mould to break.
Actually, the A3 shares a mould. VW is Audi's parent company and the A3 has been built, for reasons of economy, on the same base as the Golf. You might have imagined that this would force the cars to occupy much of the same territory, yet they could hardly be more sharply distinct from one another. The Golf is to the A3 what Little & Large are to Morecambe and Wise - merely a low-rent, end-of-the-pier imitation.
Inside are the Audi staples: plastic which doesn't look like plastic; elegant, clean controls; a densely insulated cabin which ignores road noise almost to the point of rudeness. If you never looked over your shoulder you could assume you were driving an A4 which had just come over all sporty on you.
Of course, not everybody wants a hatchback which performs like a saloon. Some people like their hatchback to act like a hatchback. After driving the A3, I found myself wondering: why?
The lowdown
Audi A3 1.8T
Price: from £14,605
Top speed: 217 km/h
Acceleration: 0-100 km/h in
8.2 seconds
Consumption: 7.8 l per 100 km
At the wheel: Graeme Le Saux
On the stereo: Moby
En route for: Hay-on-Wye
