I Sold My Audi RS4 After Five Years, And The Science Says I Am Allowed To Be Sad

Back in 2021, I wrote a story about how selling a car can quietly gut you. I was quoted in it, talking about the BMW 335i Touring I had let go after seven years, admitting I was melancholy for a week and that I asked my girlfriend to photograph me next to it, something I had never done in my life.

I read it again this morning, hours after signing over my 2019 Audi RS4 Avant. Five years on, apparently I have learned nothing. Nothing, I tells ya.

The RS4 was the car I drove every day. Home to work. Dog in the boot, surfboards, road trips, Melbourne runs, etc.

And yet it is a car. Not a pet, not a brother or sister moving to Turkmenistan. It is a wagon with a service history, tyres that needed replacing, more than a few gremlins for a 2019 model (let’s not go there), and I still felt the feels watching it get loaded onto the truck heading for its new home.

But apparently, it’s okay to feel like this. Counselling psychologist Dr Beth Anfilogoff has explained that cars are present during genuinely important life events and act as a source of freedom, comfort and reliability, which makes it unsurprising that people speak fondly of a companion of many years. She also found that people who seek comfort in objects tend to be more open, more creative and generally more emotional.

I am choosing to read that as a compliment.

The part that should worry buyers came out of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, where Norbert Schwarz and Jesse Chandler found that even small cues suggesting a product might be alive make people reluctant to replace it, and people prompted to think of their car as alive stopped caring how well it actually ran. Anyone who’s named their car will understand this.

This is a polite academic way of saying that the moment you call the car “he”, you have lost the negotiation with yourself. Former DMARGE Editor Sir Jamie Weiss named his old Ford Probe “El Probo” in the original story. I rest my case.

I also believe ego is the other half of it. The RS4 is one of the great daily drivers, and part of why I loved it is what it said about me. Looks like a school drop-off special, goes like the clappers. Especially in a world that is leaning into silent EV power.

That 2.9 litre twin turbo V6 stays quiet in a car park and then betrays you at 6am. Cold start on a winter morning and the thing clears its throat loud enough to move curtains three houses down. I learned which neighbours were early risers and which ones were not. Sorry, not sorry.

The upside of doing this job showed up on the odometer. Press loans, launches, a week in a Cadillac, a fortnight in a Zeekr, a road trip in a Yukon Denali. Every one of those weeks is a week the RS4 sat in the office carpark, and five years of that produced a reading closer to a retired accountant in Wahroonga than someone who reviews cars for a living. Good news for the buyer, and one of the rare times this industry’s perks turn into dollars.

So where do you go after it? The BMW M3 Touring was the plan for years, to anyone who asked and plenty who did not, and it simply did not happen that way. The RS6 is the natural step up, bigger and angrier and still capable of taking four people to Byron without complaint.

What I actually wanted was the Mercedes-AMG E53 Estate. The plug-in hybrid pairs a turbocharged 3.0-litre inline six with an electric motor and hits 100kmh in 3.8 seconds. Mercedes confirmed it for American showrooms, where BMW had already sent the M5 Touring.

Mercedes-Benz Australia has ruled out the C-Class Estate in every form, citing rising SUV demand and steadily falling estate demand, and the current C-Class and E-Class wagons are both confirmed as not coming here. The fast wagon is having its best decade since the E63, and we are watching from the sidelines while dealers push another GLC. Booooo! That said, the GLC53 isn’t a bad-looking car. Was half tempted.

There is also a real chance the RS4 was my last petrol car. After years of driving EVs for reviews and writing about the transition with a certain amount of scepticism, I either put my money where my mouth is or I keep talking, and that prospect makes me feel slightly ill. The alternative is patience until the RS5 Avant lands here. Watch this space…..

The silver lining is my father has bought it. Going from a BMW M4 into the RS4, which is a downgrade or an upgrade depending on how much you enjoy carrying things. The 335i Touring was his before I bought it from him, so the metal has now run in both directions, and I get to see it in the driveway at Christmas rather than in a stranger’s.

That covers about seventy per cent of the sting. The rest is the bit nobody warns you about. You do not just sell the car, you sell the version of yourself who drove it, and that person has no trade-in value.

Anfilogoff’s practical advice is the line worth keeping. Once the car is gone, you are still the same person with the same memories, and the metal was never holding them.