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Audi Canada surprises out-of-warranty owners in a good way

One of the worst parts about going to a dealership is sitting around waiting for the courtesy shuttle to show up and transport a group of strangers to their places of work or homes. Well, Audi of Canada found a nice way to surprise customers who brought their out-of-warranty vehicles in for a scheduled Health Check by replacing dealer's normal shuttle with a 2014 Audi R8 V10.
The R8, painted to resemble a safety car or police car, gave the customers a ride home - even stopping at a coffee shop along the way. Needless to say, the stunt got plenty of attention from passers-by and was quite a hit with the Audi customers, too. Scroll down to watch video of the customers getting the ride of a lifetime, which we're sure left some of the in-warranty customers at least a little jealous as they drove off in dealer loaner cars.

Next Audi TT glimpsed, same as it ever was?

Audi has teased the new TT coupe ahead of its Geneva Motor Show reveal with renderings and video, but now, what appears to be a photo of the new two-door has leaked onto the web, courtesy of Autofans.be. And if you're thinking, "Well, jeez, that looks familiar," you definitely aren't alone. Aside from the new lighting character in the taillamps, everything you see here looks pretty much unchanged from the old car. Of course, the front should get a nice freshening, and that interior should be super-high-tech. We'll reserve final judgments until we see the new TT live in Geneva next week.

A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.