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DON'T DO IT. Speaking from experience here - bought 2010 s4 recently and instantly got buyers remorse. Now, my case might not be typical because the car has 147kmiles, but still. Overall impression - they really don't want you to work on your car. Triple squares, stretch aluminum fasteners even when steel would probably do. Tighter space under the hood.
Starter is very difficult to replace, even more so than on BMW's, it right there with engine mounts and cats.
Speaking of cats, S4 bros who tune their cars often have to replace them after several thousand of miles of tune. Also pita and expensive to replace. So no tuning 3.0 tfsi unless you can fit some gutted or aftermarket cats.
3.0 tfsi also can consume some oil, although not as thirsty as 2.0t.
I guess a6, a7 got lucky because they didn't get an stronic dual clutch transmission, which has a very checkered record, including its longitudinal variant. Replacing mine, btw. Parts, new and used, are more expensive than BMW parts.
In summary, VW/Audi had a lot of good and innovative things going, but the good things were not made by them (say, ZF 8 speed), and the innovative things were not good ( stronic and some dsgs, tfsi engines).
I would not bundle up VW and Audi with BMW when taking about German car reliability. They are not the same. Imo, BMW has more honest engineering and it was less focused on planned obsolence.
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