Our rental car for our trip from the Frankfurt airport to the Nürburgring is a 2019 Audi A5 Sportback 40 with the S package. Decoded, this means our Audi is a four-door hatchback with a gasoline 2.0L turbo engine, FWD and Audi’s sports suspension. It is a good-looking car, and reasonably spacious too.
The S package also makes some updates to the car’s interior. Namely, a beautiful sports steering wheel with perforated leather grips awaits the driver. The car’s steering rack is surprisingly swift, and the steering resistance is very light, so the A5 feels a bit darty on the highway until I acclimate.
I don’t think that Audi sells the A5 with cloth seats in the USA, but we have them here in our German market model. The seats have a nice shape, and the cloth has a good knit texture; I bet a few Americans would purchase the cloth seats if they were available in the US!
My only prior experience with the A5 line was my dealership test drive of the full-hot RS5 Sportback. That car was $90k and loaded to the gills. Today I am finding down-market interior pieces in the rental A5: There is more hard plastic visible at the level of the dash air vents than I expected after my recent drive of the Audi RS5.
Audi’s button quality and tactility are still second to none, though. Every button has the cleanest and clearest click, and all of the knobs are knurled aluminum and rotate with great precision.
I found Audi’s MMI system a bit hard to use. We never got the voice addresses to be accepted, but there is likely much user error here as we Americans don’t know how to pronounce German addresses.
The A5 had analog gauges with a digital color display between them. The screen was a nice place to show the navigation map and the current speed limit.
The S pack’s firmer suspension was a mixed blessing in our trip. German roads are generally smooth, so the suspension was fine at slower speeds. But on choppy highways, the ride started to feel flinty. I don’t think this suspension would be great for the US, where choppy roads are more common. The suspension tightness was appreciated when hauling ass on the autobahn.
Sadly our rental still wore snow tires. Snows are required by German law until mid-March, so I thought they’d be swapped out as it is nearly June. Nope, most of the Sixt fleet was still on snow tires. The snow tires cap the autobahn speeds to 240 kph, but the A5 had a hard time breaking 220 kph, so it is not much of a limit. At 230 kph, I wished for less squirmy rubber anyway.
Overall the car A5 is not a fast car. The 2.0L turbo engine is familiar from other Audi and VW products, and its power, 190 hp in the Sport 40 TFSI configuration, is sufficient but not generous for the midsize A5. Even though my A5 was FWD, I did not experience any torque steer from the front wheels.
Audis are known for hiding driving details from their pilots. The A5 did not break the mold here. The chassis, thanks to the stiff suspension, communicates some details from the road, but the steering is mostly mute. The steering is light, quick and accurate, but not much fun to use.
We didn’t have much luggage to haul, but we can report that the A5 Sportback has good trunk space under its hatch. Its rear passenger space is strangely narrow, more narrow than you’d find in a BMW 3-series. I don’t know where the width has gone, but it would give me pause if I intended to carry three passengers in the rear.
Our three days with the Audi A5 were pleasant, even if ultimately the car was a bit bland to drive. The A5 lacks the sporting DNA found in BMWs but is nevertheless a comfortable, well-built, tech-savvy automobile. It was a nice get-around for our trip to the Nürburgring, and it’s probably for the better that I never wanted to toss it around the Ring.
Mike's Steering Column 