AUDI

Audi R8 V-12 TDI Concept

Luxury car Torque, as we all know, is a twisting force. It's what gives us Indian burns, sort-of-dry dishrags, and long black streaks on industrial-park streets late at night. It's also a hoot and a half, particularly when presented in quantities on level with a Caterpillar D11T bulldozer.

Audi's 5.9-liter V-12 diesel promises 738 pound-feet of torque, or a little more than Superman would have needed had he used a car and a lonely Nevada two-lane to stop the earth's rotation and spin us back in time. Wedge the V-12 into Audi's R8 supercar, and we're going a little weak in the neck.

Audi RS 6

To use the new 450-hp Audi RS 6 as your grocery-getting daily driver is to use a broadsword as a butter knife. Looking very much like your average Audi A6, the RS 6 is glorious overkill.

Audi claims this 4050-pound all-wheel-drive sedan--third in a line of RS hot-rod Audis and the first to be sold in the U.S.--sprints to 60 mph in 4.6 seconds. That's faster than the Mercedes E55 AMG by almost a second and fractionally faster than the manual-transmission BMW M5. The Audi easily reached an indicated 174 mph on the unlimited portion of the A92 autobahn near Munich. And so easily and with such supernatural stability does it maintain that speed that we found ourselves noodling with the navigation system while our co-driver bumped against the speed limiter. The limiter is set at 155 mph for all markets, so our test car had either a lazy limiter or an optimistic speedometer.