Audi S8 sedan 2020 Review – International

Nothing about the 2020 Audi S8 smacks of a powered-up A8. Audi could easily have just thrown a bigger engine into its flagship sedan and gotten away with it.

It didn’t.

Instead, it’s a rare car whose chassis outshines the engine – and when that engine cranks out 420kW of power and 800Nm of torque, you know that’s a pretty interesting chassis indeed.

It’s hard to know where to look first, so much is going on here.

But it’s probably best to begin with the dampers. Air suspension sits at each corner of the S8. That’s not unusual in this day and age of fast limousines.

What is unusual is that there are electromechanical actuators on top of each of those air suspension units and they take advice about the road in front of the car from a forward-facing camera.

They tell the ‘springs and dampers’ what to do before they need to do it. It means they’re not just active, but they’re predictive and active.

Yes, Benz was the first out with this sort of technology with the current generation S-Class, but where the S-Class can only lift a wheel, the Audi can drop it, too.

This gives it a huge range of capability, ranging from up to three degrees of leaning in to corners to rising 50mm whenever the door-handle is pulled, just to make it easier to get in and out of.

It even has safety benefits. If the presafe system detects an inevitable side impact, the suspension rises up 80mm to try to spread the load directly into the sill, rather than the door. It’s that clever.

The Audi S8 also stiffens up its front suspension under braking so it doesn’t pitch the passengers forward and does the opposite under hard acceleration so they’re not thrown into the seats.

It manages a full 1g of cornering acceleration, but the body roll has been cut from five degrees to just two degrees while it does it, the idea being to raise the car’s lateral acceleration while reducing the passenger’s.

The latest S8 has other tricks, too, like rear-wheel steering, an active rear anti-roll bar and the go-faster Audi Sport locking differential on the rear axle, just to give it that rear-drive feel.

The wheels are forged 20-inch alloys (though our car had optional 21-inch boots with 265/35 R21 rubber) and 10-piston monobloc aluminium callipers clamp the front-end’s carbon-ceramic discs. They mean business.

So it all sounds pretty good before the engine even gets going.

There’s a 48-volt electrical system attached to the thumping V8 powerhouse under the Audi S8 bonnet and it fills in the blanks for torque delivery at low engine speeds.

Not that the V8 delivers many holes. Its 800Nm of torque is on song from 2000rpm and sticks around until 4500 revs and then there’s 420kW of power to take over from it.

It’s enough to push it to 100km/h in 3.8 seconds – in absolute comfort – and on to a limited 250km/h.

The 48-volt set-up (necessary for driving the active anti-roll bar at the rear) also attaches to an integrated starter generator.

Effectively, it replaces the starter motor and the alternator, replacing it with an electric motor that does both jobs and acts as a generator under braking.

It fills up a 0.47kWh lithium-ion battery under braking or when you lift off the throttle coming down hills, then spends that energy by adding a torque boost to the engine at low revs.

It’s seamless in the way it works, and it does seem rather unnecessary to the functioning of the powertrain, but Audi says it saves 0.8L/100km on the new WLTP consumption cycle.

It’s helped by the ability to switch off four of its cylinders when it’s cruising, but it’s still no sipper because it’s all significantly heavy.

There’s an eight-speed automatic transmission, a centre diff, all-wheel drive and then all the electronics that govern it.

The cabin of the 2020 Audi S8 is a gorgeous place to be, trimmed carefully, accurately and beautifully. It’s at once taut and sumptuous and high tech, with three high-resolutino digital screens controlling almost everything in the car.

There’s good and bad in that. It used to take you two presses of the same button to switch the old S8 into its fastest Dynamic mode. Now it takes you four clicks on the high-mounted multimedia screen. That’s a long time with your eyes off the road.

At least there’s both haptic and audible feedback on clicks and it’s easy to go backwards, but some things just feel like they’re more intuitive to use with a button, switch or scroller. Even dimming the instrument cluster is a four-click affair.

Not only does the new Audi S8 score Matrix LED headlights, but it also has Matrix LED interior reading lights, so they don’t shine glare in the driver’s eyes. Clever, right?

There’s a removable tablet for the rear-seat passengers to control their Bang & Olufssen audio and their climate control system, and the rear seats are heated and ventilated – just like those in the front.

The 2020 Audi S8 is so insanely competent that it makes frighteningly dramatic situations undramatic.

It might not be the last word in driver enjoyment, but it just about the last word in driver security.

The shortcomings are the steering, which is light in weight and lighter in feedback, and the fact that it begins to feel a bit synthetic in its actions and reactions as you get closer and closer to its limits of adhesion.

You know, the bit where physics finally catches up with engineering.

The S8’s ability is eye-popping, really, from how it accelerates from any speed to how it flings its 5.18-metre body through bends that seem like hot hatch territory.

The comfort mode is brilliant from about 60km/h to 140km/h, easing over long bumps with the occupants barely noticing them. It’s less useful over sharp hits, but undulations might as well not exist in the S8.

So, too, corners. It’s so competent that we attacked the first lot of twisting bends in Comfort mode and felt only some inside front-wheel wobble as a negative.

It’s a lot sharper in both the Adaptive and the Dynamic modes, where the gearshifts are crisper, the handling tauter and the skid-control freer.

Get it right in the Audi S8 and you’ll feel like the road is somehow straighter than it looks and the straights shorter than they look, with the combination of that thumping V8 and the clever suspension conspiring to change topography.

It’s just not possible to get it wrong. Find yourself off line just a touch and the S8 pulls it all back to where you want it. It simply grips and grips in corners and the driver has to recalibrate, just to find out where it all stops.

That engine hauls, firing out of corners with so much torque and effortlessness that there is no wrong gear to be in.

A sequence of bends becomes a thing of wonder, watching the Audi S8 dance its way through the trickiest of tightening radius bends or off-camber exits.

So it’s a thing of wonder, yes, but it’s never quite a thing of joy. That’s the dilemma here, but only until you realise what its owners will need from it.

They won’t be pushing at 10/10ths all day long and it’s only as it approaches that limit that the S8 story feels synthetic.

At 9/10ths and below, the new Audi S8 is a fabulous car that combines ride quality, comfort, trim, extreme power and mile-eating ability in one technological powerhouse.

How much does the 2020 Audi S8 cost?
Price: TBC
Available: Mid-2020
Engine: 4.0-litre twin-turbo petrol V8
Output: 420kW/800Nm
Transmission: Eight-speed automatic, all-wheel drive
Fuel: 11.4L/100km (WLTP)
CO2: 260g/km (WLTP)
Safety rating: Not tested