Audi A4 2.0 TFSI Final Edition | Shed of the Week

We, or rather you lot, quite rightly complain about the state of some of the cars for sale in the classifieds. You can sort of understand traders not going to forensic lengths of cleanliness on sub-£2,000 cars. After all, posh cleaning products aren’t cheap, and you’ve got to pay the dude for his or her efforts on the other end of a Henry vac. But leaving a car as minging as it came in, which in some cases can be very minging indeed, that does make you wonder how some folk ended up in the used car game. 

So it’s a sweetly-scented relief to bring you today’s offering from the other end of the filth scale, this beautifully presented, manually geared 2008 Audi A4 2.0 TFSI Final Edition Cabriolet. The vendors have even given it a whirl on their rotating plinth, and as any EV owner without a roofload of solar panels on their house will tell you, electricity isn’t usually free. Nor is the UK’s Vehicle Excise Duty, which Shed reckons in a car of this vintage should be £395, or possibly £385. Either way it’s a lot less than the £700+ that glumly applies to many a usefully powerful old car these days.

When you’re looking at as many cheap cars as Shed does, you’ll find it hard to escape the feeling that there is a surprisingly large number of VAG (and particularly Audi) products in the under £2k category. Visually, at least, this A4 does seem to have manfully resisted the slings and arrows of outrageous corporate cost-cutting. Maybe some of that is down to these B7 A4 Cabriolets being built on a separate Karmann production line, for some reason in a slightly shorter and slightly wider size than the A4 saloon.

As the name subtly hinted, the Final Edition was the last of these B7s Cabs, the Karmann line being closed down in early 2009. At this time, Audi’s A4 was doing very nicely in DTM touring car racing. In what may or may not be a related fact the A4 got a fifth Euro NCAP star that year for crash safety.  

The 1,600kg-plus front-wheel drive Cabrio went well, its turbocharged turbo four shoving it through the 0-60mph run in the mid to high sevens as long as you were vaguely handy with that six-speed ‘box. You needed to give it some beans through the gears to get the 197hp mentioned in the brochure, but the compensation for the 5,100rpm power peak was 207lb ft of torque from 1,800rpm.

The Cabrio 2.0’s overall driving experience was more boulevardier than DTM but it did do 146mph, it did look good, and as you can see it did have a predictably full spec, including acoustic parking, which is the one where you keep reversing until somebody shouts at you. 

The cabin of this car is very fresh for a six-owner car with nearly 110,000 miles. The boot looks unused and the roof clearly opens, a 21-second process that worked on the move as long as you weren’t doing more than 20mph. You’ll need to make sure the engine has no timing chain tensioner rattle, that the valves are clear of carbon buildup, and that the oil level is right: these engines can lose lube via worn rings, faulty valve seals and leaky turbos. Water pumps are likely to fail too, but if the mechanicals have been kept up as well as the rest of the car you’d hope that it will all be OK.

Last June’s MOT returned a clean pass, the third one in a row. Shed managed a hat trick at school, not for scoring three goals but for hiding the headmaster’s trilby. As far as he knows it’s still stuffed inside the cistern of trap three in the lads’ lavs.