Quick! Name four BMW M3 competitors! Umm, umm, Mercedes-AMG C63, Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio, Cadillac ATS-V, and…Lexus RC-F? Who is missing? The Audi RS coupes and sedans. At least for me, the RS line gets forgotten, a victim of infrequent media attention and lost comparison tests. And as a Sunbelt resident, I spend my time salivating over RWD hoon machines rather than AWD winter warriors. This is why I am completely surprised when my friend Diego suggests we test drive an RS5 Sportback. Audi has a five-door M3 competitor? Huh! And RS5s easily breach $90k? Are they out of their minds?!?!
I’d go so far as to call Diego an Audi advocate, though I’m not sure he’d agree. What is indisputable is that he’s had lots of history with the brand. His parents have an Audi A6, which he’s borrowed and enjoyed. He owned a beloved Audi S3 hatchback (when Diego says he was street racing “in Mexico,” it was literally in Mexico), and now he drives a 2017 Audi Q5. The Q5 is comfortable and luxurious and exceptionally boring. Thankfully, its lease is up soon. The search is on for an equally luxurious and practical vehicle, but one that makes driving fun again. The SQ5 is the logical way to inject sport into a Q5, but he thought he’d check in with me for an outside opinion. Big mistake Diego!
We discuss the priorities ahead of time. The explicit priorities are that the new car has to be fun, cost less than $75k, have four doors, and come with AWD. Implicitly, I know that Diego will not want to step back from the luxury, quality and technology he enjoys in his Audi Q5.
But it is really the AWD requirement that is the doozy. The usual suspects are disqualified: Goodbye M3, C63, Giulia, ATS-V! When I intersect AWD with sport, practicality, and luxury in a mental Venn diagram, I come up with a fleet of hot Audis, medium-hot Mercedes, and assorted outliers like Alfa Romeo’s Stelvio Quadrifoglio. The Audi RS5 is the closest thing to making an M3 out of a Q5, so Oakland Audi is our first stop.
The RS5 that Diego’s arranged to drive is parked on the showroom floor when we arrive. The car is a stunner, wide, low and long. I approach it from the side and admire its handsome profile. The RS5’s silhouette is a photocopy, 10% reduced, of the RS7’s. That is a very good thing because the RS7 is the most graceful and best-resolved four-door coupe ever made.
If the RS7 is perfection, then the RS5 is near perfection. Its main blemish, to my eyes, is the droop in the character line that runs from the headlights to the taillights. In the big RS7, this line is straight, forceful and powerful, like a rocket scorching a path across the sky. In the RS5, this line apologetically dips to make room for the side windows and thereby causes the RS5 to lose some of its muscularity and direction.
I’ve spent little time inside contemporary Audi cars, and so I open the front door with curiosity. I’m greeted by honeycomb-quilted leather seats. (Sometime recently, the answer to the SAT question “carbon fiber is to sport as _____ is luxury” became “quilted leather”.) I slip into the sportingly-shaped front seat and find a comfortable, but not confining, perch.
I expect Audi to be a leader in interior design, but I’m a bit shocked by the stark design. The “color” palette in our test car is actually grayscale and spans from the light sliver of the seats to the black of the dash. The accent trim, carbon fiber, of course, runs the width of the dash and is as straight, narrow and long as a yardstick. When the carbon fiber spear reaches the doors, it takes a 90-degree turn onto the door cards then surrounds the equally flat door handles. I feel like the dash trim and door cards form a single, chest-high rectangle around the perimeter of the cabin. The minimized, flattened surfaces increase the interior volume of the cabin, but the design seems as cold and sterile as a laboratory. Can we add more color and spice? (Optioning the contrasting red stitching improves the cabin’s verve.)
On top of the dash, there is an iPad-like protrusion which is the navigation screen. The screen is small enough that I wonder if there’s an optional upsize. (A salesman tells me there is not.) The steering wheel is a racy flat-bottomed unit, and behind its perforated leather rim is Audi’s industry-leading digital instrument cluster. Diego explains to me that this same digital dash and nav screen are available in the SQ5 too. Like other car companies, Audi finds economies of scale by sharing its interior technology across models.
I get out of the driver’s seat and inspect the boot. The RS5 Sportback’s swooping rear roofline flows continuously into a liftgate hatch. When opened, the trunk does not appear to be deeper or wider than that of a similarly sized sedan; this is no station wagon. Regardless, the hatchback should swallow a stroller plus a suitcase or two under its privacy cover. The hatch’s wide opening gives easy access to the full depth of the trunk, so when you need to root around in one of the deeper suitcases, you won’t have to unload the contents of the trunk first.
(The last time I drove a car of this shape and size, it was a BMW 435i Gran Coupe. At the time, I loved the hatchback’s practicality and wished that BMW would produce an M4 Gran Coupe as a more family-friendly version of the M3. BMW never did, but Audi has delivered with the RS5 Sportback.)
While I am inspecting the trunk, our salesman arrives with the keys. The RS5 fires up with an assertive brap; its sports exhaust is clearly tuned to a car guy’s sensibilities. After the car is driven out of the showroom, Diego takes the place of honor in the driver’s seat. I sit in the back. (Does that make me the backseat driver?)
From the back, the RS5 feels narrow, but my barometer is off since I’ve been driving mid-size sedans like the BMW 530i recently, and the RS5 is classified as a compact car. The RS5’s wide, low, and long exterior dimensions produce better than expected legroom: I don’t have to ask for the salesman to scooch his seat forward as I already have two inches of air space between my knees and the front seat. (I suspect that a well-chosen rear-facing child seat would fit behind a full-sized adult.) But my head is brushing the headliner, and whenever Diego drives over a bump, my scalp firmly contacts the fabric ceiling. (I’m 6’ 2”.) Even so, I don’t feel claustrophobic. The large sunroof, slim dash and doors, and silver seat leather give the cabin an airy lightness. The sporty front seats are also easy to see past from the rear bench.
As you may have guessed from my stroller and child seat references above, Diego is a parent of one and is contemplating expanding his family. Could two car seats fit on the rear bench? Absolutely. Could an adult squeeze in between the kids’ thrones? I doubt it. Even though the flat door panels make for extra elbow room, the LATCH anchors are positioned to put the kids inboard of the doors (for safety) at the expense of the center-seat room.
The Oakland city streets we are driving haven’t been repaved in years. Most M3 class sports sedans would jar and jostle their passengers over this bad pavement, but the RS5’s ride is just compliant enough to avoid aggravating its occupants. The wife might prefer the glide of a Q5, but the husband won’t get earfuls of complaints that would leave him eternally regretting his RS5 purchase.
We are getting earfuls from the exhaust. The V6 rips when the throttle is opened, then blurps and belches when Diego’s right foot lifts. Absent are the gunfire cracks loved by Jaguar and BMW. It’s probably for the better; we are driving through Oakland! I’ve panned V6 soundtracks before, but the RS5’s has me grinning and chuckling.
We are directed to the highway with hopes of exploring speeds beyond 30 mph. Ha! The highway is clogged with afternoon commuters heading home to the ‘burbs. Diego sandbags it to make space between us and the car ahead then samples a 30 mph to 60 mph blast. The RS5 squirts, clearly demonstrating that it has the chops to keep up with its cohort. On a gray and wet day like today, the RS5 would mist an M3 with rainwater and road grime as the Bimmer spins its rear tires and fights traction control. (I don’t think the RS5 would smoke the M3 in a dry-weather roll race.)
The salesman points out that the RS5’s 2.9L twin-turbo V6—good for 444 hp!—is used by Porsche in its Panamera S and Cayenne S models. My opinion of those Porsches has just been elevated a notch. Regrettably, he says, the RS5’s gearbox is not a shared component: Porsche is precious with its acclaimed PDK and won’t lend it to Audi.
Diego is driving the RS5 in its Dynamic drive mode to extract the maximum fury and fire from the engine and transmission. His choice also firms the suspension, and I’m not enjoying the bumpy ride over Highway 580’s concrete slabs. This RS5 has the optional, adaptable suspension, and I suspect that for Bay Area roads its Comfort setting is a must. Thankfully, the right mix of angry engine and relaxed suspension can be tailored via Audi’s Individual drive mode.
I ask the salesman if the V6’s burbles and burps are controlled by the drive modes. He says that they are off in Comfort mode, and the driver can choose if they are on or off in Individual too.
I’ve been doing so much backseat driving that the salesman decides it’s my turn at the controls. We exit the highway, find a quiet side street, and perform a driver swap. I slide behind the wheel and find that the wheel is too far from my chest. To my surprise, adjustments to the steering column are made manually. I don’t mind taking the effort, but it does mean that the steering wheel setting is not tied to your key fob. Hopefully, man and wife like similar wheel positions.
As I drive back to the highway, I start thinking about truffles. My wife is one of those unfortunate people who cannot taste truffles. If I order a fabulous truffle risotto and share a bite, she’ll get a hint of that potent mushroom flavor but mostly sense a void in the risotto’s fullness of flavor. I bring this up because the flavor of the RS5’s steering is the same to me: There is excellent weight, response, and precision, but a void when it comes to road feel. The steering wheel only gives me wisps of road texture and tire impact when I want to clearly taste all that is happening at the tires. It’s as if Audi benchmarked BMW’s steering but picked the 2018 340i M-sport as their target rather than a 2011 M3.
Now that we are driving against the rush-hour flow, I can exploit the car’s power. I quickly roll into the throttle and find that at 3k RPM the V6 needs a moment to pick up its skirts before the turbos take flight, and so do we. The 2.9L engine doesn’t have enough displacement to completely hide the turbos’ spool time. Once on the boil, the engine pulls furiously from 4k rpm up to the 6,700 rpm redline, at which point I tug a flappy paddle and receive a whip-crack upshift. I love that this turbo engine is tuned for top-end power, which is perfect for hard driving on the autobahn or track, rather than for low-end huff that favors lazy suburban traffic and fuel economy.
Considering the quick shifts from the ZF sourced 8-speed automatic, I’d say Audi is doing just fine without Porsche’s PDK. In fact, I am a little jealous: My M3’s DCT used to shift with this tight precision, but after 75k miles, slop has crept in. (The RS5 bests the tired M3’s body control and ride comfort too.)
As I pull off the highway, I grouse about the black, wood-grained plastic around the shifter. Couldn’t a nicer material have been used here? The salesman mentions that Audi employs teams of people to make sure that the smell and feel of Audi’s cabins are just right. I nearly laugh-out-loud as I imagine teams of white-coated Germans sniffing switchgear in the RS5. To check their work, I press a random HVAC switch. It is possibly the best automotive switch I’ve ever felt. The switch itself is constructed of cool metal; it depresses with tight, crisp, and positive action and then emits a clear “click.” I am reminded of the incredible weight and precision that permitted all the controls of the Porsche 911 GT3 and also of the hyper-accurate buttons on the high-end computer-gaming mouse I use at home. Is it strange that my strongest impression of the RS5 is its buttons and switches? I guess I do need to drive more Audis.
Back at the dealer, the salesman asks Diego if he is ready to put a deposit on the RS5. He is not. Even though he is over the moon about the RS5, there are Mercedes, Teslas and Alfa Romeos to drive first. Will any of them be able to challenge the Audi? I doubt it. At this price point, I can’t think of any other car that is as accomplished as the RS5 when it comes to performance, technology, luxury and design. It turns out that Audi was not out of their minds when they put a $90k sticker on the RS5.
Mike's Steering Column 