BY JUERGEN ZOELLTER
Audi chairman Martin Winterkorn says proudly that the TT "is an icon." The car's critics, on the other hand, always regarded the first-generation TT as a slightly sportier Volkswagen GTI dressed in a mighty fine party frock. When it went on sale in the U.S. in 1999, it aimed to compete with the Mercedes-Benz SLK and BMW Z3. The second-generation car, which goes on sale here early in the summer of 2007, is pitched even more ambitiously against the Porsche Cayman.
The new TT shares some of its architecture with the latest Golf, but it now shares less with its VW sibling than the first-generation car. Like the Golf, it has grown up in the intervening years and now measures 164.5 inches long and 72.5 inches wide, up by 5.4 and 3.1 inches, respectively. The most radical change is that it uses a combination of a unit body and aluminum space-frame construction, with 69 percent of the structure being aluminum and the remainder steel. As a result, the '08 TT is about 200 pounds lighter than its predecessor.
Maybe you recall that some early TT models wound up in high-speed crashes on Germany's autobahns, after which Audi fitted cars with a tail spoiler. Mindful of this, the new car has located another three percent of the car's weight over the rear end, giving a more equitable 55-to-45-percent front-to-rear distribution on all-wheel-drive models, and there is a spoiler integrated into the trunklid that rises at 75 mph and lowers at 50 mph.
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