• Massive amounts of room and seating for seven
• Vast boot and flexible seating boost practicality
• Five-star safety rating and masses of useful tech

How much space is there?

Lots. One of our staffers most recently used a Q5 to ferry his entire family from Cumbria to Glasgow and back – and he didn’t get a single complaint about the lack of space, even though there were three across the rear bench.

It’s vast inside. The front seats are enormous and have footwells large enough to lose suitcases in. The rears are a little tighter on account of needing to make room for the middle seat – but when you’re using it as a cupholder/armrest, it’s positively palatial. Headroom is excellent everywhere, too.

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Plus, because the Q7 has two extra seats in the back (with Isofix points), you can carry up to six children in safety and comfort. Of course, the rearmost seats are better suited to children than adults, especially on long journeys, but those measuring six-foot tall will still physically fit in them. And if you need a little extra legroom in the very back, you can slide the second seating row forward to liberate some.

Boot space and storage

With third row of seats stowed, the Audi Q7 has 780 litres of boot space. Fold the second row flat and that figure expands to a whopping 1,908 litres. That’s first figure is a staggering 130 litres larger than the BMW X5 – and a whopping 30 litres ahead of the ever-practical Skoda Kodiaq.

The plug-in hybrid-powered Q7 55 TFSI e sacrifices a lot of boot space to its battery pack, but it can still haul 650 litres of luggage with the second row in place and 1,835 litres with all the seats folded flat. Or, to put that another way, the same as a non-PHEV BMW X5.

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Our only gripe with the boot is the parcel shelf. It’s an electrically operated number, but the frame into which it retracts has been mounted too low down in the boot. That means you can’t stack two standard carry-on suitcases on top of each other without removing it.

Interior storage is reasonable, but rivals are better organised. For example, there’s a storage bin under the centre armrest up front, but it’s consumed almost entirely by the wireless charging pad. That means, the cupholders in the centre console are full, there’s nowhere convenient to put your house keys.

Is it easy to park?

Not really. But it’s about the same size as a student flat, so what do you expect? Happily, Audi has loaded it with technology to make it easier to steer it into even the tightest car parks. Spend extra on Audi’s Technology Pack and you can have a 360-degree camera and an automatic parking function.

Audi’s optional rear-wheel steering also helps by trimming the Q7’s turning circle and making it easier to thread through tight gaps. When our staffer took his Q7 test car to Glasgow, he had to steer it into a very neat underground car park, but he escaped with neither curbed wheel nor dented panel in sight.

Safety

• Six Isofix mounting points as standard
• Five-star Euro NCAP rating (from 2019)
• An arsenal of safety technology

Euro NCAP last put the Q7 through its paces in 2019 and it emerged from the facility with a glowing five-star safety rating. The testers we particularly impressed by the car’s ability to protect both its adult and child occupants. Every dummy was pulled from its wreckage relatively unscathed, although it’s worth noting that NCAP has since tightened up its safety regulations, so the Q7 might not score as well if it was retested today.

Standard safety equipment includes lane-departure warning (which is a little irritating in our opinion), traffic sign recognition (which works utterly flawlessly, even on smart motorway gantries) and Audi Pre-Sense, which monitors the road in front for potential collisions.

As well as this, buyers can option the City Assist Pack, which comes with Side Assist (blindspot monitoring), Pre-Sense Rear, Cross-Traffic alert for the front and back of the car and an exit warning function that scans for oncoming traffic at blind junctions.

Watch the Audi Q7 Euro NCAP crash test video