Cards on the table, I’m an Audi man. Blame my age and upbringing. As a child of the 1980s growing up in the London commuter belt, BMW was for Essex wideboys and Mercedes was for old people, which left you with Audi. (Assuming you wanted to buy German – which everyone did.)

Back then, Audi was tearing up rally stages with the Quattro, taking four-wheel drive to the masses, not just farmers and soldiers.

So when it came to buying my first proper car – fresh out of university and living in London – I did my research. I needed something small enough for easy city parking and, as it was just my wife and me, we didn’t yet need to worry about fitting in a Bugaboo. (Yet.)

Against its rivals, the A3 won hands down. It was a second quicker to 60mph than the equivalent BMW and two seconds faster than the Mercedes, yet it looked far better and cost far less. No brainer.

It was a brilliant little car – and I still rate its looks today. Audis have always possessed a certain grace and minimalist understatement compared with their Teutonic brethren.

Audis have always possessed a certain grace and minimalist understatement compared with their Teutonic brethren.

Fast forward a few years and the Bugaboo was needed. I went through the same process and reached the same conclusion: this time, the A4 Avant won out.

Again, it has been a superb car that’s never once let us down. (I mean, my wife once reversed it into the house – but the error definitely lay with her on that occasion.)

So what next?

It’s time to join the big leagues. The A6 Avant is calling. And, purely in the interests of responsible consumer research, I thought I’d better try one out for size.

Now, I appreciate this is subjective, but I maintain that Audi’s estate cars are by far the best-looking of their breed. They have curves in all the right places, aggression in spades and beautiful proportions. And what a rear end! (It’s OK to objectify – it’s a car.)

I’ve discounted the e-tron variant for now. Range anxiety is still a thing, particularly when the car is fully loaded with children and luggage and the prospect of spending 45 minutes at a motorway services ranks somewhere between root-canal and soft play.

So, the sensible decision would be the e-hybrid. Economical, practical, fast enough and free from the tyranny of the charging network. A test drive is duly arranged. And your correspondent is duly impressed.

Audi A6 Avant e-hybrid

The first thing you notice about the A6 e-hybrid is just how easy it all is. There’s 299PS on tap, quattro four-wheel drive and enough shove to make overtaking entirely stress-free, but none of it feels remotely frantic. This is a car that seems happiest demolishing large distances while its occupants discuss where to stop for lunch. (Alastair Sawday has never let me down in this regard so far.) Which, increasingly, is exactly what I require from a car.

The clever bit, of course, is what’s happening underneath. The 20.7kWh usable battery offers an official electric range of up to 63 miles, meaning that most school runs, commutes and trips to the shops could theoretically be completed without waking the petrol engine at all. Plug it in at home and a 7kW wallbox will replenish the battery in around two and a half hours. Suddenly the hybrid starts looking less like an environmental compromise and more like a rather clever way of avoiding petrol stations.

It’s particularly good at putting energy back into the battery, too. Regenerative braking can be adjusted through three levels using the steering-wheel paddles, while the car can use navigation data, gradients, speed limits and even traffic ahead to decide when it should harvest energy for itself. Under braking it can recuperate up to 88kW with the electric motor handling more than 90% of everyday deceleration if you’re not driving it like you stole it. In other words, even slowing down has become productive. If only the same could be said of middle age.

Inside, meanwhile, Audi has remembered what it does best. Build quality is first class, the materials feel reassuringly expensive and the whole cabin wraps itself around you without becoming a nightclub of unnecessary technology. Instead, there is just the right amount of tech: an 11.9-inch OLED Virtual Cockpit sits alongside a sweeping 14.5-inch central touchscreen, while higher-spec cars add another 10.9-inch display for the passenger.

My only slight bugbear is I would like a few more real buttons. Call me old school.

But most importantly, it is supremely comfortable. The seats are excellent, the cabin beautifully insulated and the ride has that lovely big-Audi ability to make a motorway gradually disappear beneath you. Frankly, they could sell the thing at DFS.

So, it’s comfortable, clever, economical and plenty quick.

But I live down a country lane with potholes larger than some moon craters. And occasionally have requirements to drive across a field here and there. Fortunately, Audi now has an answer for that, too.

Audi A6 allroad

Enter the new A6 allroad: the car for people who need an SUV but would really rather not admit defeat and buy one.

This is not simply an A6 Avant wearing some plastic around its wheelarches. Now in its fifth generation, the new allroad is a substantial bit of kit – its body is 11cm wider than before – and underneath sits quattro four-wheel drive and adaptive air suspension designed specifically to deal with rougher terrain. The ride height can be raised when the going gets agricultural, then lowered again at speed.

The engine is rather appealing, too. The conventional allroad uses a 3.0-litre V6 diesel producing 299PS and a hefty 580Nm, assisted by Audi’s mild-hybrid system and an electrically powered compressor designed to eliminate turbo lag. The result is 0-62mph in 5.4 seconds – hardly RS 6 territory, granted, but sufficiently rapid that nobody is going to accuse you of holding up proceedings.

It also gets all-wheel steering, which sounds like the sort of thing you wouldn’t notice until you drive a five-metre-long estate through a multi-storey car park. At low speeds the rear wheels turn in the opposite direction to the fronts, effectively shrinking the turning circle; at higher speeds they turn with them to improve stability. Clever stuff, particularly given that the allroad is hardly what you’d describe as petite.

And despite all the extra capability, you don’t sacrifice the reason for buying an estate in the first place. Fold the rear seats and there are up to 1,497 litres to play with. You can load it with children, suitcases, bicycles, muddy boots and all the other paraphernalia that gradually colonises your life.

Audi A6 Avant

It’s worth remembering that Audi will still sell you an A6 Avant with an engine in the front and a fuel tank in the back. How reassuringly old-fashioned.

The conventional A6 is arguably the purest expression of what this car has always been about: a handsome, beautifully made executive estate designed to swallow enormous motorway journeys without making a fuss about it. In the UK, the range tops out at 204PS and 400Nm, with front-wheel drive or quattro available depending on powertrain. The 40 TDI quattro will dispatch 0-62mph in seven seconds flat – which is, well, fine.

The diesel is probably the one I’d choose here. There’s something wonderfully appropriate about a TDI engine in a big German estate: effortless torque, excellent long-distance efficiency and none of the need to plan your life around a charging cable. Selected powertrains also get Audi’s MHEV plus mild-hybrid technology, which can recover energy under braking and assist the combustion engine.

And because there isn’t a large plug-in-hybrid battery eating into the packaging, you get the A6 Avant in its most straightforwardly practical form.

Perhaps that’s the standard A6’s greatest strength: there’s no elevator pitch required. No discussion of electric range, charging speeds or whether your house has a driveway. Fill it up, load the boot, point the four rings towards France and get on with it.

Audi A6 Avant e-tron

And then there’s the one I said I wasn’t going to consider.

I dismissed the fully electric A6 earlier on the grounds of range anxiety. Audi’s rebuttal? 444 miles on a charge. Touché.

There are several versions, with range varying according to battery, drivetrain and specification, but the headline figures are impressive. At its most long-legged, the A6 Avant e-tron will manage that aforementioned 444 miles; at its quickest, it’ll hit 62mph in 4.5 seconds. More importantly for anyone contemplating a proper journey, its 800-volt electrical architecture allows DC charging at up to 270kW. Find a sufficiently powerful charger and a 10-80% top-up takes around 21 minutes. That’s not filling-station quick, admittedly, but it is comfortably within coffee-and-a-croissant territory.

And being electric hasn’t robbed it of its Avant credentials. There are 502 litres behind the rear seats and 1,422 litres with them folded, plus a 27-litre ‘frunk’ under the bonnet for charging cables and assorted paraphernalia.

There’s another benefit that becomes apparent from behind the wheel: silence suits an A6. The whole point of a big Audi estate is to make long-distance travel feel almost indecently easy, and removing the vibration and background thrum of an internal-combustion engine only amplifies that sense of calm. Instant electric torque helps, too.

Would I buy one? I’m still not sure. A theoretical 444 miles is not the same thing as 444 miles on a freezing February night with four people aboard, a boot full of luggage and the heater on full whack. And public charging remains an additional complication I’d rather opt out of. For a car that needs to make it to the Alps and back without inducing divorce, I still don’t think it’s the one.

Which leaves me with something of a quandary. The e-hybrid is almost certainly the car I should get. The allroad may be the car that actually suits my life best.

Whichever way I go, I’m certain it will be the best estate money can buy. 

Decide for yourself at audi.com