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Wagon without a hitch

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THE Audi A6 Avant brings culture to the culture of entitlement.

If your car-purchasing motives include impressing the boorish burghers of the County Orange, there are plenty of flashy cars at the $50,000 price point that bounce the needle more.

The A6 Avant is a car for people with money who would really rather not make an issue of it -- your anonymous-opera-benefactor types.

It’s also quietly gorgeous. Redesigned for 2006 and just hitting the market, the station wagon has a newly sleek skin that looks curried by the wind, a restyling that buffs out any linearity of the previous design, which wasn’t exactly boxy to begin with. All the exterior detailing is vacu-formed, sucked into the bodywork: The glass and polished window surrounds are nearly flush; the door handles are embedded into the sheet metal; the lighting instruments (including the new LED tail lamps) wrap around like a military contractor’s sunglasses. With its tapering glass canopy and converging rays rising from the rocker panels, the car has the same fluid geometry and organized energy of a Zaha Hadid building, not hugging the ground but hovering just slightly above it.

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I can’t think of a luxury car with a better sense of the moment. Exhibit A is the fact that Audi will sell the car in the United States only with a 3.2-liter, 252-hp V-6 motor -- reversing a long-standing trend among European carmakers of exporting cars with the biggest motors they can stuff under the hood (the sedan is available with a 4.2-liter V-8).

As gas prices remain stubbornly stuck around $3 per gallon, and with worse likely to come, I expect we’ll see the horsepower wars become more of an indexed competition between output and efficiency. The A6 Avant -- a five-passenger, two-ton, all-wheel-drive estate -- gets 19 miles per gallon city and 26 highway. A small turbo-diesel could add five miles or more to each of those numbers.

Equipped with direct-fuel injection, variable induction and variable-valve timing, the Audi’s humming V-6 reaches its maximum torque (243 pound-feet) at mid-throttle (3,250 rpm) and keeps pulling. But due to the fuel-saving algorithms of the six-speed automatic, the transmission frequently short-shifts into higher gears, which can give the car a kind of dead-stick feel. You have to switch over to the tranny’s Sport mode or pick your gears with the steering wheel’s manumatic paddles to bring the car to life. Properly coaxed, the car can reach 60 mph in 7 seconds and reaches its harmonic stride at three-digit speeds.

WHILE other companies agonize over their “crossover” designs -- too many of which come off as ugly and oversized, the wagon as orthotic footwear -- the Audi A6 Avant once again demonstrates that a fast station wagon with all-wheel drive is the ultimate road vehicle. Just by virtue of its wide stance and the optional 18-inch, 40-series tires our test car wore, the A6 Avant has loads of mechanical grip. The steering is light and self-centered and dead-on accurate, the brakes pretty near heroic.

The Audi’s optional air suspension -- variants of which turn up under everything from Bentleys to VW Phaetons -- offers a hard setting for sport handling, but I like the way the car handles on the normal, softer setting. The slight increase in pitch and roll movements helps my internal gyroscope better feel what the car is doing. The car handles like a well-balanced match pistol.

When grip starts to go away at any wheel, the car has its Quattro all-wheel-drive system backed up with stability control (which my weekend test drive didn’t call upon). The end product is a car with an easy, transparent athleticism -- you don’t really notice how good it handles until you climb up the back of slower traffic -- and forget-about-it security.

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So, where won’t this car go that would justify the purchase of a leggy crossover or body-on-frame SUV? It’s got 4.6 inches of maximum ground clearance -- slightly more with the optional air suspension -- and that’s enough for any bash up to the slopes. It’s worth noting that Audi discontinued its very fine Allroad crossover last year, a tacit acknowledgment that the pure station wagon is a better packaging solution.

INSIDE, the A6 Avant is virtually the same size, give or take an inch, as the much larger, much heavier VW Touareg SUV, and offers comparable cargo capacity. The Audi’s cargo hold is tricked out with dual bed rails with sliding fixtures to secure cargo, as well as a retractable web belt and a telescoping brace, all to keep stuff from sliding around. For storage of wet items, there’s a shallow plastic tub secreted under the cargo floor. If you are a pharmaceutical rep racking up hundreds of miles a week, I think I’ve found your car.

The A6 Avant is the corner office of the mobile workspace. One of the options available is a docking station for a Treo Bluetooth smart phone, which integrates the PDA with the car’s optional phone and voice-recognition system, all of which is accessible through the rotary control in the wide central console. Other options include heated rear seats, adaptive cruise control, power rear tailgate, electronic parking assist, heated steering wheel and advanced optics headlamps.

In other words, everything in the Audi catalog is available in what is essentially a midline car. Sometimes luxury carmakers will make desirable features exclusive to their top-of-the-line models, which can have the effect of driving buyers into bigger cars than they need. The A6 Avant seems like a template for a next generation of premium, have-it-all cars with smaller footprints.

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2006 Audi A6 Avant

Base price: $47,590

Price, as tested: $61,930

Powertrain: 3.2-liter, dual-overhead cam V6, with direct fuel injection and variable-valve timing; six-speed automatic with manual-shift program; all-wheel drive.

Horsepower: 252 at 6,500 rpm

Torque: 243 pound-feet at 3,250

Curb weight: 4,167 pounds

0-60 mph: 7 seconds

Wheelbase: 111.9 inches

Overall length: 194.2 inches

EPA fuel economy: 19 miles per gallon city, 26 mpg highway

Final thoughts: Avant means forward

Automotive critic Dan Neil

can be reached at dan.neil@latimes.com.

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