Enthusiasts Blogging Our Favorite Classifieds
If you missed out on last week’s S-Fest II, have no fear. Our reader John has been on patrol and recently sighted this great looking 1992 Audi S4. The 1992 has some nice advantages in stock form over the later run cars; however, this particular example has been further modified with turned up boost, suspension and some European market goodies. In rarer-to-see black over grey leather, it looks like a pretty tidy package:
Do you think you know Audi and Volkswagen products from the 1980s well? There are a lot of people who claim to, but it seems that at times even VAG didn’t know what it was producing. Take, for example, this 1986 Audi Coupe GT. Now, according to most sources for a long time, if you wanted to get the digital dashboard in a 1986 Audi Coupe GT, you had to get the “Commemorative Edition” GT which came only in white or graphite. Yet as the owner of what was originally a Oceanic Blue non-CE Audi GT with an original digital dashboard, I can attest that in fact cars outside of the normal production run were fitted with the somewhat quirky bit of 1980s fad technology. If you talk to most Audi folks, they stand firmly in two camps. The small camp says that the digital dash is really, really cool; the far larger camp sees it as a glitchy gimmick that seldom works properly and is hard to service. But having owned one for the best part of two decades now, I can say mine has never experienced much of an issue. It had neat features, such as the “shut off the entire dash” feature which left you only with a speed reading. I think I used it once, only to show someone that it existed. At startup, you could tell your friends that you had programmed the cover art to Ghost in the Machine by The Police into your dash. Much more fun, though, was the ability on the fly to switch the dash from English to Metric units; if you were alone on the highway with an unsuspecting passenger, you could flip the dash into metric and then brag about how you were going “150” with ease. Okay, maybe I was the only one who thought it was funny, but there really weren’t many advantages to the digital dash otherwise. Despite that a smattering of 1986 and 1987 (non-“Special Build”) cars, seemingly with no particular order or logic, were fitted with the Atari-esque bit of technology:
“It was bound to happen”. Over the past few months we’ve seen a spike in Audi 4000 Quattro prices, and with the spike the nice examples have started to come out of the woodwork. As a $2,500 car, you keep it until it dies. As a $5,000 car, you treat it well and it changes hands from time to time. Once prices crest $10,000 – prices that 4000s haven’t brought since the 1990 – people start flipping them. It makes sense; the 4000 Quattro is a great car but for $13,000 you can get many nicer, faster cars. Last week I wrote up a Tornado Red 1985 4000S Quattro that had reported fresh paint and seemed to be a good example, but failed to push a price as high as I expect the owner was looking for. Today’s example is arguably a bit nicer, but shown in the same shade – will you be seeing red?
We’ve been lucky enough to see a string recently of very nice condition 4000 quattros, with the nicest and highest priced breaking the $10,000 glass ceiling on these models. That’s apparently signaled to other 4000 owners that the market is prime to get out at current top dollar, ignoring the confluence of factors that combined to create that record sale. A super well documented, fully sorted and all original example, that car also found the right buyer at the right time. In contrast, today we have a decidedly unoriginal 4000S quattro with an asking price unsurprisingly right around the sale amount for that 1985 model. Will a modded 4000 bring stronger money than the average? Take a look and see what you think:
If today’s 5000CS quattro Heap of the Week got your hopes up for older big Audi ownership on a budget, this S6 should get your blood flowing as well. That 5000 was going to need a lot of work to get it into shape, and in the post I suggested you could get a later 200 in better shape for less than it would cost you to resurrect that 5000. Well, here you go; an even more recent and arguably more desirable last-of-the-run 1995.5 Audi S6 in similar black over black: