Audi Q7 Long-Term Review: Living with a Luxury SUV

Luxury carmakers are obsessed with screens. Their cars now come with massive screens, curved screens, passenger screens, a gazillion combinations for ambient lighting, fragrance dispensers, and enough connectivity features to make your smartphone feel redundant. The Audi Q7 isn't that. At least this particular generation, which is on its way out. It's old-school luxury in the best possible way, and after living with it for the last two months and covering 2,500km, I have come to appreciate something rather unusual about it.

Now that the time has come to hand the keys back to Audi India, I'm genuinely going to miss it. Yes, I am aware that if you look at the competition at this point, there is no single standout feature on the Q7. No party trick. No one thing I would point to and say, 'That's why you should buy a Q7.'

Instead, everything works together so well. The thing that has stuck with me for the longest time is that the Q7 never quite gets under your skin in the way a BMW X5 or a Mercedes GLE might. It's a car you admire more than you adore. There is a slightly clinical quality to the way it goes about things. Nothing feels dramatic, quirky, or eccentric. Yet over the course of two months, I realised that the Q7's appeal isn't built around character flaws or quirks. It's built around the fact that every single thing works exactly as it should, every single day.

My every commute would start similarly. Open the heavy door, slide into the broad driver's seat, and shut out the chaos of Mumbai. The outside world instantly becomes distant. Auto rickshaws, metro work, impatient Ola/Uber drivers, and honking at traffic signals all fade into the background.

The cabin has that unmistakable luxury car smell, too. Just expensive leather, solid materials, and that faint scent of a well-engineered interior that's been screwed together properly. It's the kind of cabin that makes you want to operate things just because everything feels substantial. The switches click with precision. The rotary controls move with purpose. Nothing feels flimsy.

Maybe that's exactly why the Q7 feels refreshing today. This generation of the Q7 has quietly stayed loyal to physical controls where they matter. I am still not a fan of the touch-sensitive AC panel, but for everything else, there are buttons, and there is something reassuring about being able to adjust functions without taking your eyes off the road.

The gear selector area is a perfect example. It's surrounded by actual buttons. The sort that responds with a satisfying click rather than a vague vibration pretending to be feedback. It sounds like a small thing until you spend two months using it every day.

Then there are the thoughtful touches. Take the dual sun visors. Currently, our weather is such that the sun can attack from multiple directions simultaneously. With the Q7’s dual visor setup, you can block glare from the front and side windows at the same time. It's such a simple solution.

The centre console also features a dedicated space for the key fob. Again, not revolutionary. But after years of tossing keys into cup holders, door bins, or random storage compartments in test cars, having a specific place for them feels strangely satisfying.

And then there's the practicality.

Fold the third row away, and the boot becomes enormous. Not large. Properly enormous. Be it luggage for weekend getaways or shopping trips, that boot swallowed everything without complaint.

The electrically adjustable third-row seats make the process effortless, too. Press a button, and the cabin rearranges itself. No wrestling with straps. No awkward lifting. The funny thing is that none of these features would make for an exciting sales pitch. Yet they are exactly the things that I have come to appreciate the most.

One aspect of living with the Q7 that constantly intrigued me was its choice of engine. In India, large seven-seat luxury SUVs and diesel engines have traditionally gone hand in hand. Buyers expect effortless low-end torque, long cruising ranges, and reasonable fuel economy. With the Q7, I haven’t gotten the majority of those things because Audi sells it only with a V6 petrol engine option. This engine doesn't deliver that herculean shove from idle that you get from large diesel engines; however, it counters with something else: smoothness. It's quieter, more refined, and feels far more expensive during everyday driving. Now whether this engine’s silky-smooth nature is enough to justify fuel bills that would make your eyes water is a question only the actual buyers of the Q7 can answer.

What has impressed me the most isn’t outright performance but how effortlessly the engine goes about its business. Whether crawling through Mumbai traffic or covering huge distances on the expressway, it always feels relaxed. A couple of trips to Pune and Karjat highlighted this perfectly. Hours passed without fatigue. The seats remained supportive, and conversations happened without raised voices. I am a huge fan of audio systems in these fancy vehicles, and the Bang & Olufsen audio system in here is like the Q7 itself, impressively old-school and straightforward. There is very little to fiddle with when it comes to tuning the audio because there are no environment-based sound modes, which are just useless to my ears.

That said, living with the Q7 hasn't been entirely flawless. The gearbox is a bit of a weak link. Don’t get me wrong, most of the time it's smooth enough, but occasionally I have caught it napping. Also, a lot of times it would thump into first gear from park even when the powertrain is all warmed up. I had a solution for the gearbox’s lack of enthusiasm, though: leave it in Dynamic mode. The responses become sharper, and it suddenly feels far more awake. But it shouldn't really require changing driving modes to have that in the first place.

Then there's the width. At nearly two metres wide, the Q7 often required folding the mirrors because more than once, I found myself apologetically holding up traffic while carefully threading it through gaps on narrow lanes that clearly hadn't been designed with large SUVs in mind.

How is the ride quality, then? On smooth roads, particularly Mumbai’s Coastal Road and the Eastern Freeway, the Q7 feels magnificent. It glides along with genuine composure, isolating passengers from the outside world. Unfortunately, the rest of Mumbai’s roads have a habit of exposing weaknesses. Sharp-edged potholes and badly repaired surfaces occasionally send unwanted vibrations through the seat. The air suspension does its best, but I have noticed those 20-inch wheels certainly make their presence known.

And then there's fuel economy. As I said, the Q7 isn’t exactly economical, and in the current climate, an average fuel economy of around six kmpl isn't easy to ignore, especially when petrol prices are at an all-time high.

All things considered, would I consider keeping an old-school luxury SUV like the Q7 again? Honestly, yes, because what the Q7 does well, it does exceptionally well. It's comfortable and luxurious without being flashy. Practical without feeling utilitarian. Most importantly, it never tries too hard. And in a market increasingly obsessed with gimmicks and digital distractions, that feels surprisingly refreshing.

An all-new generation of the Q7 has already been revealed globally, and there are undoubtedly areas where it will improve upon this car. I'm looking forward to spending time with that car, but for now, as I look out from my balcony and realise this particular Q7 is no longer parked downstairs, I find myself missing it more than expected. Not because it was perfect. But because it quietly made my everyday life better, and that's probably the highest compliment I can give it.

Pictures by Kaustubh Gandhi