There is a brief period in the life of a young family when you already have a child, but have not yet become a municipal transport operator.
One child. That is only a car seat, a pushchair, a bag from the pharmacy, a scooter, spare trousers, apple purée and the sudden realisation that the boot no longer belongs to you.
The second child brings two seats, two coats, two collections of filthy shoes, a territorial dispute in the back row and the first serious conversation about whether perhaps you ought to buy something “a bit taller”.
The third child is the finishing line. At that point, you stop choosing a car and start procuring a vehicle.
Which is why, whenever a young family asks me what they should buy, I like to say, “An Audi A5 Sportback,” and watch their faces rearrange themselves.
Yes. The Audi A5 Sportback may be the best car for a young family.
Not a large family. Not a family with an Alsatian, three electric bicycles and a grandmother permanently on board — occasionally also electric. I mean the sort of family that already has a child, but still has one final opportunity to drive something beautiful.
The A5 Sportback is a magnificent lie.
From the outside, it pretends to be an elegant German fastback for someone with an expensive coat and a difficult personality. Then you open the rear hatch — glass and all — and discover something deeply suspicious: ordinary family practicality.
Five doors. A proper back seat. Isofix. Around 480 litres of luggage space in the previous generation. And, crucially, a large opening through which you can load a pushchair without performing the ritual humiliation usually required by a saloon.
It is not a coupé. It is not really a saloon either.
It is an Octavia that went to a spa, learned French and tore off its corporate name badge.
This makes particular sense in countries with good roads, functioning motorways and cities designed before anyone imagined that every household would one day own an armoured personnel carrier.
A large SUV is often not a necessity. It is psychological compensation parked in an underground garage, two centimetres away from another swollen victim of the same insecurity.
The A5 Sportback does not pretend to be expedition equipment. It simply performs normal family duties without turning its owner into the operator of a domestic appliance.
It is excellent on the motorway. In town, it does not feel like a container ship. On a wet mountain road, quattro does not begin composing its final letter home. And with one of the sensible four-cylinder engines, it does not drink fuel so much as taste it carefully, with full awareness of what it now costs.
Most importantly, once the child has been deposited at nursery or school, you are still sitting in a car that looks like your decision rather than your sentence.
YOUR DECISION.
NOT YOUR SENTENCE.
Naturally, someone will say, “But a Superb estate is more practical.”
Of course it is. A shipping container is more practical than a suitcase.
That is not the point.
The point is whether you want to approach your car every morning and see physical evidence that life has defeated you.
The A5 Sportback is not the roomiest car. It is not the cheapest. And it will not win every category in a spreadsheet.
That is precisely why it works.
It belongs to that short period when practicality has become necessary, but total surrender remains optional.
When the second child arrives, you will begin looking at estate cars with unusual seriousness. When the third appears, you will start saying phrases such as “sliding doors” without irony.
But until your boot becomes an annex of the house and the rear seats are declared a humanitarian disaster zone, you are still allowed one last beautiful mistake.
One last beautiful mistake.