I don’t think it’s coincidental that Audi decided to let us drive the new RS5 Avant soon after revealing its technical details.
If you’ve seen any online reaction to its unveiling, you may have noted some dismay that the kerb weight is 2355kg (hatch) or 2370kg (estate). The latest BMW M5 elicited a similar response; both are high-performance plug-in hybrids. Those are big numbers, so there are preconceptions to dispel, but Audi thinks that actually driving the RS5 will do the trick.
The car is a direct replacement for the RS4 but with a different name, because Audi briefly revised its naming strategy and this is a hangover from that. Maybe they had already made the badges.
And it’s as heavy as it is because making a PHEV is one of the few options left open to a company that wants to make super-saloons. A fully electric sports saloon could be perceived as insufficiently exciting, as modest RS E-tron GT sales suggest. And the days of simply fitting a whopping engine to an executive estate are largely behind us: German tax rates are much kinder to cars with a 50-mile electric range and there are many other places where a reduced headline CO2 emissions figure is advantageous. In the US they mind big engines less – at the moment, anyway – but Audi couldn’t have known that when it started this car's development.
And so here we are with Audi’s first RS PHEV.
Audi opted, then, to mate a 2.9-litre V6 petrol engine making 503bhp and 443lb ft of torque with a 174bhp/339lb ft electric motor mounted within the gearbox, for a system total of 630bhp and 608lb ft. There’s a 22kWh (total) battery beneath the boot floor, and together the engine and motor drive all four wheels through a Torsen limited-slip centre differential. So far, so Quattro.
But Steffen Bamberger, Audi Sport’s head of technical development, says he wanted the car to not only have traditional sporting Audi security but also an agility and a rearward-biased balance like never before. It’s a theme that Audi has been chasing for a while, ever since fitting a crown gear centre differential to the RS5 Coupé in 2010. But this time it has gone much further than ever. “We wanted it to be an oversteering car,” says Bamberger.
You will probably have seen the smoky pictures by now, so I won’t try to maintain the suspense: they’ve got one. Partly it owes its behaviour to a centre differential that can let up to 85% of torque head towards the rear wheels, but the bigger advantage is what happens at the rear axle. A 5bhp motor mounted around the differential may not sound very significant, but once geared down it can create a torque difference of up to 1475lb ft between the rear wheels, slowing or accelerating left and right driveshafts independently.
Let’s talk this element in more detail. We’ve seen cars with clutches on independent sides of a differential before (the previous RS4 had one, in fact), but they act mechanically, which regulates the speed they can work at, and they can only distribute whatever torque is being delivered to them at the time. That the RS5's rear mounted motor can generate and deliver its own torque means it’s not dependent on throttle application. Because it’s electric it reacts quicker. And because it’s a motor it can drag as well as just engage or disengage.
It also means there’s no need for active rear-steer, which must have been a temptation in a 2.4-tonne car, even if the weight is balanced 49:51 front to rear. The motor exists to slow an inside rear wheel to encourage the car to car turn, plus apply positive torque to the outside to overspeed that wheel, so it can help introduce an oversteer slide and then mess around a bit to keep it going.
But even if you’re not drifting (because who ever does in a car like this?), its effect its at its most notable well within the realms of grip, on corner entry.
There are significant other technical highlights too, I should add. The wheels are 20in as standard but 21s more likely to be optioned. The 285/30 tyres are either Bridgestones (both sizes) or grippier Pirelli P Zero Rs (21s only), front and rear. However, the wheel widths are different – 10J on the front, 10.5J at the rear – to give stiffer tyre sidewalls at the rear and greater control.
Without them, and without prodigious tuning, Bamberger likens early development iterations of the RS5 as like being a student with a loosely strapped satchel bumping around on their back – a nice analogy.
Lastly, suspension is by coil springs rather than air, with adaptive twin-valve dampers with four stages of adjustment. Anti-roll bars are passive but “the biggest you can find on the market”, says Bamberger, not entirely seriously but not unseriously either. He wants the car to remain as flat as possible in roll and pitch to get the most out of the drivetrain.
The steering ratio is overall 13:1 (down from 15:1 in the standard A5), for just over two turns between locks, and is a little slower in the centre than at the edges.
The steering wheel isn’t exactly round, to the annoyance of Audi’s still fairly new CEO Gernot Döllner.
It lives in a cabin that, like the exterior, has received some highlights, like flared wheel arches and doors outside, bolstered seats inside and carbonfibre and piano black lowlights (hardly anyone ordered the silver highlights that Audi used to offer).
You can have a hatchback they call a saloon or an estate they call an Avant. Rear leg and head room are fine in both.
The boot, while reduced in capacity from the regular A5 (330 litres in the hatch, 360 in the estate), is probably fine unless you routinely fill one to the roof. Likely a bigger annoyance is that the boot floor doesn’t lift, which means the charging cables and tyre repair kit don’t have an obvious snug home.
The engine is very smooth and the motor, because it can torque-fill or pull revs up and down during gearshifts, responds exceptionally urgently. Gears are changed rapidly and super-smoothly.
The headline figures are that the RS5 can go from 0-62mph in 3.6sec and onto 177mph if you spec the Performance Pack, but it’s the immediate response that’s more impressive than those figures. In the angriest of drive modes, motor response is genuinely alarming (and we will come to the effect that various motor responses have on driving characteristics in the next section).
If you select the Performance Pack (21in wheels as standard) it comes with carbon-ceramic brakes. Some earlier sporting Audis, like the TT RS, suffered from brake fade. The engineers were determined this one wouldn’t; 440mm diameter front and 420mm rear discs should do it, even at this weight, and indeed I had absolutely no issues with brake fade.
Braking is by wire, and that I have nothing to report about brake feel is very encouraging about how it blends regen with pads.
My first moments behind the wheel of the RS5 are on a slalom topped by a group of cones that are meant to form the centre of a slidey circle. The engineers really are very pleased with this car’s transient behaviour. With the driver aids off and the car in an RS Torque Rear mode it throws itself in an increasingly sideways pendulum along the slalom until, suitably Scandi-flicked, we reach the circle at the end. I’m instructed to slam the throttle down and keep it there and it pirouettes around the cones for a moment before exiting the cloud of its own smoke for a return run. Not quite rear-wheel drive but very much not conventional four-wheel drive either. It behaves a bit like a rear-biased 4WD supercar such as a Ferrari 849 Testarossa or, in fact, an Audi R8.
Then I drive a few laps of a small, technical and dusty circuit, mostly in an RS Sport mode that forgoes the ultimate tail-happy demeanour for solid damping and maximum efficiency. This is the fastest drive mode. What I find, regardless, though, is that if understeer thinks about settling in, more throttle and more steering don’t see the nose pushed ever wider. Instead that rear motor cranks in the inside wheel, overspeeds the outside wheel and pushes the rear of the car outwards, tightening the line. Yes, of course that mullers the tyres, but it’s a hoot. And if Audi’s plan was to rapidly attempt to quell concerns about the RS5’s weight by demonstrating how unhingedly agile it can be, I would say it has proven its point.
Which is great, but fewer than 1% of all cars on the Nürburgring are Audis. It actually makes fast road cars that can do a dynamic job when asked; RSs are mostly daily-driven. And in the RS5, Neckarsulm has engineered a car with a very significant breadth of ability, doing those daft things at the extreme end but, with the dampers nestled into Comfort mode and the engine quiet or even entirely off, this is a refined and smooth executive car. I’d normally insert caveats about baize-adjacent overseas roads in here but some of Morocco’s are, astoundingly, even worse than England’s, and the RS5 rides with comfort and not very much of the discernible jostle that you might expect with thick passive anti-roll bars charged with controlling a car of this mass. I guess the centre of gravity is relatively low.
The steering is good: always precise and variable in weight through three settings, ranging to quite heavy for an Audi, albeit not by all competitor standards, in its meatiest setting.
It’s easy to get into a groove with the RS5 and it demonstrates very good body control and resistance to pitch and dive.
Even on the road, that rear axle makes itself very obvious, acting like active rear-steer would to nudge the car’s line into the corner, thereby reducing the amount of steering lock one needs, and making the car feel more agile than it would. And because an electric motor can braking a wheel more quickly than an active steer can adjust its angle, the system has clocked on, done its work and clocked off in a flash as you turn in. You know it’s doing it, but by the time you’re conscious of it, it’s all but over, leaving a car that feels naturally perky.
There are a few different ways to disguise a car’s mass, but I don’t think I’ve discovered one that makes a car of this size and weight feel quite so alert as it does. We will undoubtedly see it again in Audi’s bigger RS models.
The PHEV powertrain has more than short-term benefits for Audi. It thinks this is a good strategy for the foreseeable, letting it sell cars in places where pure-ICE RSs would be a no-go, and cars that are more exciting and long-distance, high-speed usable than EVs.
As I write, full MPG figures haven’t been released, but with a 50-mile range and estimated 87-106g/km CO2 figures, the RS5 should return around 70mpg officially – more if you plug it in routinely, less if you don’t. In which case, the mere 48-litre fuel tank might have you stopping more regularly than you would like.
We expect a benefit-in-kind tax figure of 26% or thereabouts – nuch more than you would pay for an EV, of course, but less than a pure-ICE car.
The RS5 will cost from £90,220 in base hatch form to around £110,000 as the Performance Pack Avant that UK buyers will actually choose.
It's astounding what car manufacturers can make heavy cars do. If you give a car the right tyres and the right steering response, you can make them feel lighter, notes Bamberger. I suspect there’s more to it than that – and that the RS5 will eat tyres if you use it hard on a track – but I take his point. The RS5 does feels much more agile than the numbers suggest it would.
Obviously it will take a more closely controlled test than this one to assess it alongside the competition but, going by memory, the RS5 feels like it has more nuance and certainly breadth than the BMW M3 Competition, with more capability but less natural fluency than the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio.
All the cars in this segment do things differently enough that they have their own appeal – but what the RS5 does, it does with ability and verve.
Matt is Autocar’s lead features writer and presenter, is the main face of Autocar’s YouTube channel, presents the My Week In Cars podcast and has written his weekly column, Tester’s Notes, since 2013.
Matt is an automotive engineer who has been writing and talking about cars since 1997. He joined Autocar in 2005 as deputy road test editor, prior to which he was road test editor and world rally editor for Channel 4’s automotive website, 4Car.
Into all things engineering and automotive from any era, Matt is as comfortable regularly contributing to sibling titles Move Electric and Classic & Sports Car as he is writing for Autocar. He has a racing licence, and some malfunctioning classic cars and motorbikes.