Audi S5 Sportback 2017 Review

Audi S5 Sportback    
International Launch
Ingolstadt, Germany

Audi’s current A5 Sportback looked, on paper, to be a breakthrough. It has sold well in Europe, but it’s frequently discounted. The new one looks a quantum leap over that car and it feels far more like an integrated piece of the A5 family, too. And that’s how it also drives; delivering swift, calm assurance, plenty of power and bags of space. Expect the new A5 and S5 Sportback in Australian showrooms around mid-2017.

Things started looking up for the all-new S5 Sportback the instant Audi lifted the covers off the standard A5 version.

In place of the slightly gangly, high-waisted current model, the new one looked sleeker, with more pronounced haunches and its design fitted neatly into the whole A5 family. The current one looks suspiciously like it was only thought of two years after the A5 Coupe and Convertible teams had clocked off.

It’s bigger inside and out, too, but counters that by losing about an adult male in weight (85kg) while still delivering up 480 litres of luggage capacity beneath its liftback hatch.

Its beating heart is the same turbocharged 3.0-litre V6 powerplant Audi placed inside the S4 sedan, and its output specifications are exactly the same, with 260kW of power and 500Nm of torque.

The EA838 engine was developed jointly with Porsche and shares plenty of parts with the Panamera’s new V8. Given that it still hangs ahead of the front axle line, it’s helpful to the handling package that the 172kg V6 is 14kg lighter than the old S5 Sportback’s supercharged V6.

Its power peak arrives at 5400-6400rpm (up 6.5 per cent on the outgoing S5) and its 500Nm torque plateau (60Nm more than the old one) hits from as low as 1370 (about 500 revs above the engine’s idle point) and it stays on until 4500rpm.

Given that it weighs 1660kg, that’s enough urge to haul it to 100km/h in the same 4.7 seconds it takes the (1630kg) S4 sedan and it’s easily enthusiastic enough to need electronic governing at 250km/h.

While the S4 has similarly-powered rivals like the Mercedes-AMG C 43, the Jaguar XE S, the BMW 340i and the Maserati Ghibli, the S5 Sportback’s direct competition is somewhat limited. Actually, very limited. You can line the stock A5 Sportback models up directly against fewer models, though there is BMW’s 440i Gran Coupe.

Partly, then, some of its competition is going to come from the S4 and for whatever reason, the S5 Sportback feels like a much more integrated, much more composed car over a wider range of road conditions.

The beauty of the old S4 was its ability to spend most of its life as a well-equipped A4 and then turn nasty when the mood took its driver. This B9 generation S4 doesn’t quite retain that feeling, becoming more of the second thing and less of the first, but the S5 Sportback sure does.

The numbers indicate real strength across the board, which is a promise followed up convincingly on the road.

The power and torque are corralled by standard all-wheel drive and a mandatory eight-speed ZF automatic transmission, which sends 60 per cent of its drive to the rear as the default torque split.

While this is a move to make the car feel more rear-drive and agile to spite its overhanging front engine, the system can almost instantly shuffle drive from 85 per cent to the rear to 70 per cent to the front axle if it needs the bite.

Downstream of that, the enthusiastic pedal pumpers can plump for the optional sports differential on the rear axle to deliver extra accuracy and punch and turn-in bite when just having all-wheel drive isn’t enough.

It’s a bigger car than the one it replaces; a full 21mm longer, 11mm wider but 5mm lower. It has 14mm of that stretch located within the 2824mm wheelbase and Audi has somehow stretched this to 17mm more in the cabin.

There is 24mm more rear knee room and it’s 11mm wider at the shoulders, too, but the sloping roofline still hampers headroom for the Sportback’s taller inhabitants.

People generally come to the A5 Sportback format because of the combination of style and practicality. It’s like a halfway point between the A4 and the A6, but less visually stodgy than either of them.

The interior gives up five seats, though only four of them could properly be called full seats for full-sized adults and the middle seat in the rear is more or less decorative.

Most of the extra wheelbase has been given over to rear-seat legroom, and its luggage capacity has grown 15 litres to 480 (exactly the same as the A4 sedan) with cargo hooks and nets, but it lacks underfloor storage. Fold the 40:20:40-split folding rear seat down and that stretches to 1300 litres of luggage capacity.

The interior design, fit and finish won’t take a backwards step to anybody. It’s brilliantly clean and comfortable, combining new bits beautifully with enough familiar touch points to keep people from feeling out of place.

The sports seats of the S5 Sportback are borrowed from the S4, and why not? They’re superb, look classy and work effectively on both short, sharp bursts and sustained cruising. The flat-bottomed, leather-clad steering wheel helps it to be an easy place to get comfortable in, quickly, and then you start to notice the technology.

The S5 Sportback sure doesn’t want for information, with the optional 12.3-inch virtual cockpit replacing the traditional dials, plus an 8.3-inch multimedia screen integrated into the centre of the dash and a head-up display on the windscreen.

There’s the metallic scroller for the multimedia system, which feels lovely in the fingers and it’s even comfortable in the rear.

Of the other cars in this category, only Benz’s C-Class comes close to the S5 Sportback cabin’s combination of leather, metal and carpet and its feeling of quality and sumptuous precision, but the Benz’s body style is quite a bit stodgier.

The five-door body has the usual S model tweaks like matt alloy-looking mirror caps, a slightly tweaked single-frame grill with alloy-look slats, oval tailpipes and the stock sports suspension rides 23mm lower than the standard A5.

One of the first notable things when the car gets rolling is how it manages the ride-handling trade-off, and it does it beautifully. It helps that there’s so little wind noise at speed (its drag coefficient is down to just 0.26Cd), but the whole thing just imbues its occupants with calm, except when it really gets going.

The engine is a treat, though perhaps intentionally not as intrusive as the old one at full throttle. Instead, it drapes you with a feeling of sophistication and strength across the board. It’s an incredibly flexible motor and though it has eight gears, it feels like it only needs three or four.

There’s an authority and urgency to the way the turbo V6 responds to the throttle that belies its sheer ability to cruise like a junior limousine and from any speed, from any revs and in any gear, it simply hurls the car forward.

Overtaking is simple and requires no more effort than moving one foot, a little bit. You can pull out of corners with finesse on the throttle, or by just mashing it and letting the all-wheel drive and the computers assistance systems figure it out. Which they do.

It doesn’t seem to lose any throttle response compared to the old V6 and its mechanical supercharger, but it feels stronger across the board and the dullard noise of the S4 seems to have been addressed here, livening up to the point of being genuinely menacing at the redline.

The S4 has its issues with a lack of nuance across its engine range in Dynamic mode, but the S5 Sportback doesn’t replicate the issue.

It sounds sweet, its tone changes as it approaches its 7500rpm limiter and that gives you the choice of either short-shifting in the thick torque curve or just blasting up to the limiter and snapping a paddle shift. They’re equally pleasant ways to eat ground.

The transmission, which the faithful may think of as a weak point in the on-paper line-up, is brilliant. It doesn’t matter if you leave it to do its own thing or shift it on the steering wheel paddles, because it just gets on with it so well that you barely notice it’s even there.

It is one of the fastest-reacting automatics out there, finally approaching BMW’s shift-software brilliance and snapping up shifts on full throttle with a little crackle and no loss of speed. Its efforts to walk back down the gearbox are aggressive and positive in the Dynamic mode and almost imperceptible any other time.

The all-wheel drive system is terrific on its own and utterly brilliant in concert with the optional differential, yet you need to have a serious conversation with yourself about how hard you drive and how often before you tick that expensive box.

The ride is firm, but beautifully controlled and ripping a chunk of weight out of it helps the car’s agility no end, despite the unengaging steering feel. Well that, and that it has the MLB Evo architecture of the A4 as its baseline.

It comes with the option of magnetic dampers, which are worth having if only because the standard mechanical layout initially hits sharp bumps hard before the damping smooths things out. It leaves you with the impression that the fixed-rate dampers try to be all things in all conditions, while the magnetic ones actually are all things in all conditions.

Oddly, it’s a significantly more involving car to drive than the S4, slowly, quickly or all points in between. It engages the driver in ways the sedan doesn’t and has warmth to its efforts and a feeling of security and calmness, even if you’re at or beyond its substantial grip limits.

It’s a lovely car in most rational ways and in a surprising number of emotional ones, too.
Class-leading interior quality and equipment, composed handling, comfortable and quiet ride and interior practicality for four adults, all wrapped in a more cohesive design that combines sleekness with an aggressive design that screams engineering prowess.

If that’s what you need, it’s going to be a hard car to go past.

2017 Audi S5 Sportback pricing and specifications:
Price: $120,000 (estimated)
On sale: Mid-2017
Engine: 3.0-litre turbo-petrol V6
Output: 260kW/500Nm
Transmission: eight-speed automatic
Fuel: TBA
CO2: TBA
Safety rating: TBA