Type 44/5000 safety rating

[Michael Guidotti]

....The car has been built with all the available safety measures available to
it at it's time of design and build, and is still today, a marvelously safe
vehicle, even though the "star" safety rating is no longer glorious to
today's standards....

I have to disagree with this, the 5000's did not have airbags when other cars had them, ie mercedes and porsche, even when the 200's finally got airbags it was only for the driver! and that was because the US govt said that they had to be there(ok well they had a choice of a drivers side airbag or a motorized seatbelt and it would have looked really bad if they did not put the airbag in there!). It is only till very recently that Audi seems to be going way out of their way to make the cars safer than required, although if you look at crash tests on the new A6 they do not do very well. all of the other cars do much better, especially the A4 which has an amazing amount of features that will probably not be required for many many more years.

Mike Guidotti