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Not too long ago, you had to look at Italian mid-engined exotica, which wielded six-figure price tags, to find 400-plus horsepower and 0-60 mph times under four seconds. These days those kinds of performance numbers are regularly coming from Germany, but not in hard-to-live-with half-million-dollar supercars. No, the mainstream sports car segment is now boasting those kinds of numbers, and the 2018 Audi RS5 is sitting on top.
This isn’t a story of one brand copying another brand, then adding more horsepower and declaring itself the winner, either. For the 2018 RS5, Audi has employed an all-new engine, plus its own brand of performance and style then slapped a price on the coupe that undercuts its rivals by a noticeable amount. It’s a shot across the bow of BMW and Mercedes, and it’s no empty threat.
Verdict: Speed — most sports cars on the road have it, none of them deploy it like the RS5. And it does it in two, distinctly different ways, both of which can get you into serious trouble on public roads. The first is the all-out acceleration from a standstill. The 2.9-liter bi-turbo engine fires 444 horsepower and 443 lb-ft of torque to all four wheels, barely reigned in by the RS-tuned traction control, launching the car forward with such immediacy you’d think you just creased the asphalt.
The second way the RS5 gathers speed comes into play when making a pass on another car. The coupe will happily cruise around town and at highway speeds like any of the other Audis lacking an RS badge. But, even when cruising in a higher gear at, say, 65 mph, and I put my foot down, the torque builds so deceptively, and without drama, I’m flirting with triple-digit speeds before there’s a chance to activate a blinker and get back in the middle lane.
99 percent of 2018 RS5s won’t see a track. Most of them will live happily as everyday drivers, running errands and commuting. What Audi has done is made a sports coupe for the day-to-day, but snuck in a Konami code that unlocks a true beast fitting of the Audi coupe lineage.
What’s New: At the heart of the RS5 is a new 2.9-liter bi-turbo V6 with a hot-inside-V architecture — the turbos sit inside the ‘V’ of the engine as opposed to on the outside. This gives the engine better response and efficiency. Some may balk at the idea of downsizing the engine from the V8, but not only is the new V6 more powerful, it’s also lighter. Combine that with a lighter car, and the new coupe shaves almost a full second off the outgoing RS5’s 0-60mph time — officially rated at 3.7 seconds, though third-party tests have clocked the new RS5 closer to 3.5 seconds.
