Opinion: the latest Audi R8 does have a manual*, and it's absolutely massive

As any seasoned road tester will tell you, the latest Audi R8 is a spectacular supercar with just one real flaw: the only transmission you can have is a double-clutch auto. The R8 doesn’t have a manual, and that’s a travesty.

All these road testers, however, are wrong. The latest Audi R8 does have a manual. It’s made of paper, it lives in the glovebox, and it is, officially, massive.

Yes, in the type of utterly pointless research of which I greatly approve, a company called ScrapCarComparison.com recently took it upon itself to analyse the owners’ manuals of some of the bestselling cars out there today. And it found that, when it comes to word count, the longest of the lot was the Audi R8’s, clocking in at a monstrous 616,000 words.

The R8’s handbook, ScrapCarComparison sagely noted, weighs in 28,000 words longer than War and Peace, and would take the average reader 43 hours to read in full. Which is a slightly unfair comparison, as even the most dedicated new car owners don’t tend to consume the handbook cover-to-cover.

The R8’s manual isn’t just a little longer than average. It’s massively longer. The Ferrari 812 Superfast’s handbook? A mere 48,000 words. Is an R8 really six times as complicated as an 812 Superfast? Or has Ferrari deduced that the sort of buyer in the market for an 800bhp, 8,900rpm V12 firestorm-on-wheels is possibly a little too... highly strung to spend 43 hours researching the intricacies of its Bluetooth system?

The Huracán manual is just lots of drawings of flame-spitting rockets, and dogs on skateboards

Maybe it’s about value for money. After all, the R8 has always prided itself on offering more of the supercar experience for less, and in the handbook department at least, it’s doing so. That said, has Audi considered the impact of all those words on the R8’s power-to-weight ratio? In this era of marginal gains, lugging around all that additional ink and paper could cost valuable milliseconds around the Nürburgring.

(Also, I know what you’re thinking: how long is the Lamborghini Huracán’s handbook? After all, being very closely related to the R8, you’d assume it would be of similar length, right? Wrong. The Huracán manual is just lots of drawings of flame-spitting rockets, and dogs on skateboards.)

ScrapCarComparison’s excellent research didn’t only analyse car manuals’ length, but also their readability. The most complicated manual, it discovered, was that of the McLaren 765LT, which, though a mere 59,000 words long, boasted a ‘reading ease score’ of 44.3, which basically makes Ulysses (the James Joyce book, not the Fiat MPV) look like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

The easiest manual to read? The Tesla Model Y’s, which, apparently, could be understood by the average 12-year-old. At least until Elon releases an over-the-air update to add a whole bunch of extra complication...