[Adrian E]

I bought my old one when i was planning to take a career break to look after my then-baby son (he's 11 this weekend!). I'd been idly wondering what to get - we'd only had the 1 car for quite a while as most of my travel at the time was by train due to commuting to central London.

It was almost inevitably going to be something VAG (we had an a 2004 A6 Avant at the time, and had sold a Leon Cupra R, Passat 1.8T estate etc) and I was pretty convinced I wanted either an S4 or S6. Unfortunately most of the former had dodgy history and/or longlife servicing (if at all) and the latter were in very short supply due to the RS6 (which I couldn't afford and didn't want the theft risk of).

Eventually my idle work time was spent browsing for anything sub-£10k with a dirty big V8! The S8 popped up - at a posh dealer - with sensible price tag, low miles and lots of recent bills for recommissioning and a brand new set of Michelin boots on the 20s. Went down to Poole to test drive it and LOVED it! It was sat in a showroom with Bentleys and Astons and didn't look a bit out of place, despite being far older than anything else in there.

I figured I'd run it for 2-3 years and move it on - ended up keeping it far longer, but in the end I just needed something slightly more practical in the boot department, and I was finding it spending more and more time sat in the garage unused as it was easier to just grab the keys to the one I didn't have to use a decorator's extension to put into neutral before manually dragging it out of my single garage.......

I do regret selling it, as I know I'll never have the option of another one just like it, but for me it was a great experience that I'll always have fond memories of. If I did still have it, I'd have had problems from day 1 after moving house as my garage is too short for the D2