Audi S5 Cabriolet 2017 Review

Personally, I’m not a fan of this style of car. There. I said it. A key part of the S5 badge is its secure, accurate (if not precisely fun) handling. The key thing cars lose when they have a hole in the top this big is the strength to resist twisting, and so they tend to lose their feeling of security and accurate handling.

It’s an easier problem to get around when the hole only has to be big enough for two seats, but four-seat convertibles like the S5 make life incredibly difficult for chassis and suspension engineers.

It only takes about two minutes inside the new S5 Cabrio before you appreciate just how organised it feels, no matter how you feel about the sensibility of the concept.

Yes, there is some body flex over lumpy roads. It’s unavoidable. But the S5 Cabrio doesn’t seem to suffer below decks in any disturbing ways even when the windscreen frame shudders ever so slightly above decks.

Even with a stiffer S5 suspension beneath it, only the most violent of pothole strikes will deliver anything like a complaint via the steering wheel.

Mind you, in the best of modern Audi traditions, it doesn’t deliver anything much else through the steering wheel, either. The Drive Select system, which alters all manner of parameters to fiddle the car’s character to make it either chilled out, sporty or the best of both worlds, only stiffens up the weight of the steering wheel.

It’s accurate enough, but you’d have to put it through years of psychotherapy before it would reveal any of the road’s subtle secrets.

The same with the handling package generally. It’ll do everything you’d expect it to do. It will grip and grip, thanks to all-wheel drive handling and some clever five-link geometry at both ends, but it won’t be overwhelmingly fun doing it in any way. It will just whip around corners with extreme competence, refusing to be upset about sudden road shocks, and you’ll come away respecting the achievement, rather than wishing you’d taken the long way around to get the milk and bread.

It also rides pretty well, but it allows more body roll in corners than other S5s because Audi fitted it with a softer suspension tune as another way to keep the shimmie-shimmie-shakes out of the body over bumps. And it mostly works.

But there are other bits and pieces that make this a better car than the one it replaces. It’s lighter, for one thing, by 40kg, though that still makes it 225kg heavier than the current hard-top coupe version, even though they run on the same core MLB Evo architecture.

It’s also quicker than the old S5 Cabriolet and 40 per cent stiffer (though the reinforcing girders needed to get to that figure account for most of the 225kg difference to the coupe).

That weight is also the sponge that soaks up four tenths of a second difference to the Coupe in the sprint to 100km/h, pushing it out to 5.1 seconds, though it totes the S5 Coupe’s 250km/h limited top speed.

So it’s still reasonably fast, so there’s that. That’s the easy bit, because the powertrain had already been developed for the S4 and the S5 Coupe, so it’s kind of plug-and-play.

And it plays well. Actually, it plays even better than it does in the Coupe, because you can hear more of it, more of the time.

The 3.0-litre V6 turbo hammers 500Nm of torque through the eight-speed automatic transmission from just 1370rpm and by the time the 260kW power peak has finally begun to fade away, it has spun the tacho needle around to 6400rpm.

That all means it’s got terrific breadth of performance and that’s how it feels on the road. It’s never caught short for gristle, never really needs to drop down a gear to punch through something and you know that an overtake is just a toe prod away.

What’s more, with the roof down you can hear the turbocharger fizzing and hissing away where they are purely calm contributors to the aural proceedings in the coupe.

It retains the pops and burbles and bangs on the overrun and adds a layer of depth that just isn’t there in the splendid isolation of the closed-roof version and you’re just not going to find fault with the way it switches through its gears, either up or down.

To get the best out of it, though, you have to spend 15 seconds waiting for the roof’s folding theatre to conclude (it takes another three seconds to rise again), but the good news is that it can be done at up to 50km/h, which is some feat with a parachute this big hanging off the back.

It’s a bigger car than before, too, picking up 47mm in length to clock in at 4673mm long, while it rides on a 2765mm wheelbase that is up 14mm on the old car.

That leaves it with a touch more front shoulder room and rear knee room, but the critical measurement for most is that it has 380 litres of luggage space with the roof up or down, and still keeps a 50:50 split-fold in the rear seat.

It retains everything the Coupe version has in its interior, but picks up a couple of cool new features, the best of which is its seatbelt-mounted microphone, which makes it clearer and easier to drive the voice-recognition systems or just to talk on the phone when the roof is down.

It carries over the entire S5 Coupe suite of driver assistance and safety systems, too.
But would you buy it? Well, that’s hard to say. BMW’s 440i Convertible is pretty good and the Mercedes-AMG C 43 Cabriolet is somewhere thereabouts, too.

It’s still sporting the best interior of the three and, like the others, you lose the rear seat if you want to run the wind blocker.

For its target markets, it’s quick, easy to drive, easy to use, luxurious inside and feels absolutely bullet-proof.

2017 Audi S5 Cabriolet pricing and specifications:
Price: TBC
On sale: September
Engine: 3.0-litre twin-turbo petrol V6
Output: 260kW/500Nm
Transmission: Eight-speed automatic, all-wheel drive
Fuel: 7.8L/100km
CO2: 177g/km
Safety rating: TBC