Audi RS5 Avant review

Is it a good looking car? Answers on a postcard please, but it’s certainly a step up from the S5, and at the front the only carry-over panel is the bonnet. The valance is full of air ducts and the fretwork glass black grille looks up to the minute but highly vulnerable to damage.

Moving along the flanks there are heavily swollen sills which you clean with the back of your trousers when you climb out and the rear is dominated by absurd oval exhaust snaps which lose their appeal when you see the stubby standard round pipes peeking out like shy hermit crabs. It’s a cartoon car, especially those rear arches which Audi would have us call ‘Quattro-influenced’, but in fact look unbalanced and plain weird.

Move up the trim levels from standard £91,300 Avant (£89,400 for the saloon), to Carbon Black on 21-inch wheels at £97,385 (£95,485 saloon) and then to fully-loaded Vorsprung at £109,385 (£107,485 saloon) and the car gets increasingly garish, such that the camouflage carbon fibre trim on the top models looks very close to the mottled-effect plastic trim on a Dacia Duster…

Audi interiors, once the envy of the industry, have taken a bit of tumble in the last couple of years. Materials, meeting points, designs and the way they’re put together haven’t been as good as they once were and it’s been noticed. The RS5 is largely good, though. Not an exemplar of the old, but mostly solid, and well put together with neat meets and stitching. There’s not a lot of room inside as it’s basically A4-sized and there’s rather a lot of padded interior jutting at you, but the rear seats are just big enough for a couple of adults and it’s comfortable and supportive as long as the driver isn’t tearing up the tyres where the side forces overcome the seat bolstering. The boot swallows a modest 361 litres, since it houses the large battery, and 1302 if you fold the rear seats to give a flat load bed.

The facia is glassy with a long shallow single piece consisting of the instrument binnacle and centre touchscreen, which curves round the driver with an additional standard (and quite distracting) touchscreen for the passenger. Graphics have an over-bright hyper reality and the maps aren’t entirely easy to follow.

This of course is the virtual cockpit which Audi debuted back in 2014 and since then, others have caught up and perhaps overtaken. Besides, the business of cramming heater controls into the screen is hardly cutting edge these days and that’s before we get onto the slightly questionable steering wheel, which considering Audi RS wheels used to be the absolute tops, is a crying shame.

Settings for the drivetrain and chassis are numerous and confusing. You dial in a setting but there’s no indication of what has actually occurred and in many cases it worsens the ride, makes the steering feel like a warp got wrapped round the propshaft and gives the throttle St Vitas Dance.

To start with the basics, the suspension is an elegant aluminium five-link independent system front and back, with two-valve damping all round which can be adjusted separately for bump and rebound. You can dial in Comfort, Balanced (me neither), Dynamic and various noisy RS settings. There’s EV or Hybrid (pretty obvious), and a couple of brake recuperation modes. So it’s perfectly possible to turn a moderately well-balanced car into a pretty horrible one.

I ended up in Comfort where the steering was woolly but as good as it gets, though it desperately lacks any kind of on-centre response, which you might say is, so far, so Audi.

But I haven’t told you about the hardware yet, so here goes…

Before we get to that remarkable rear axle, let’s talk about the rest of the drivetrain. The rehashed 2.9-litre V6 engine has twin variable-geometry turbos, reworked exhaust manifolding and water-to-air intercoolers which are more efficient in space and cooling. The engine also uses the Miller Cycle where the intake valves close early to give a longer power stroke and improve economy – Audi claims that under load the fuel economy of this V6 is 20 per cent better than that of its predecessor. There’s also an increase in power from the previous unit‘s 444bhp to 503bhp and peak torque of 442lb ft.

Inside the torque-converter eight-speed automatic transmission is a 175bhp/339lb ft electric motor driving into a Torsen torque-sensing differential moving torque front and back according to available grip – the split can be as much as 85 per cent to the rear axle. The battery is a 25.9kWh gross (22kWh net) unit offering 52 miles of electric range and speeds up to 87mph, though not at the same time. It charges at up to 11kW AC and at that level of energy it will take a full charge in 2.5 hours.

Top speed is 155mph (177mph if you opt for the Vorsprung model) and 0-62mph is achievable in 3.6sec. WLTP fuel consumption figures for plug-in hybrids are largely meaningless, but for the record, economy is quoted at 72.4mpg for the standard car and CO2 emissions are 89g/km. Basically however, it’s more powerful, goes faster, accelerates more quickly and stops in less distance than its predecessor, the RS4 Competition.

Then to the back axle and Audi’s replacement for its previous Sport Axle, a copy of the item in the long-departed Honda Legend, where the crown wheel and pinion tries to turn the wheels about 15 per cent faster than the road speed would demand and then the slip is taken up by two electronically-controlled clutches on the outside of the differential, which can be closed completely to speed an outside wheel to positively drive the car through a turn.

The new system comprises an open differential with twin planetary gearsets on a common shaft, with one braking against the differential housing and the other on the output shaft. A 10.7bhp/29.5lb ft electric motor drives the system either by braking or driving the gearsets. Such is the gearing of the system it can deliver 737lb ft either in driving a wheel or by braking the other. In effect it is a super accurate torque vectoring system, which can drive the car through a turn and mitigate tail slides and understeer if necessary, and give you a form of drift mode. Given that the old Sport Axle was pretty good, but with all those friction clutches and overdriven axles, something of a hostage to fortune (or previous owners’ driving styles) when the car got older, this does the same thing, but more accurately and with less wear.

Is it any good? Audi’s test drivers were giving the test cars a pretty good work out on a tiny motorsport track in Austria on the launch, drifting the rear about and generally overdriving, which was absolutely ruining a perfectly good set of tyres, but showing that if you want to and have the pocket book for a new set of Bridgestones every other day (the best price I could find for a pair of 285/30 R 21 Potenza Sport rear tyres was £520) then you can drive it around like Frank Kelly in his Escort Mark 2 Baby Blue.

I hate that sort of thing in a road car and elected to drive the RS5 on the racing line where it felt like it was carrying every one of its 2445kg as well as being every one of its 2099mm of width, but also surprisingly wieldy and mega quick, just like all the more recent examples of the RS badge.

For what these cars lack in the finer arts of steering feel and balance, they make up for in sheer brute force and mechanical grip. The optional carbon ceramic brakes are pretty good, too, though they cost £8490 and are only available on the upper two models.

We steamed up one of the Austrian Alpine passes, all back out sliding hairpins and quick direction changes and the RS5 makes you feel better than you really are. As one policeman friend of mine one wearily put it: ‘villains like performance Audis, they’re easy to steal, fast and don’t take too much skill to drive quickly.’

I could add that tea leafs don’t buy their own tyres…

But if you are just going to gran’s for lunch, the ride isn’t too bad, as long as you remember to dial in Comfort and the economy doesn’t look too poor either with my estimate of 37mpg if you stroke it.

If you are looking for the finesse and lightness of touch of a rear-drive car, nothing comes closer than the BMW M3, especially now that Mercedes has ruined the C63 with a horrible four-pot drivetrain; but of them all, it is Audi which continues to make the best getaway cars.

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