You’ve probably experienced it yourself. Someone at work gets cut and you’re expected to take on their job as well as your own. That’s what’s happening to the new Audi S5, which won’t only replace the old S5, but the S4 as well. Audi is switching all combustion cars to odd-numbered badges and dropping the A4/S4 sedan body style, so the new A5 and hot S5 Sportbacks are suddenly far more important than they were previously.
The Ingolstadt crew rarely does anything
revolutionary with its sedan designs, and with the need to also appeal to more
conservative A4/S4 buyers further complicating the brief, it’s no wonder that
the new S5 looks very similar to the old. That’s not a diss; we like the look
of the old car. But non-Audi geeks might need to really pay attention to the
details to tell old and new models aside. Those details include flush door handles,
Audi’s latest segmented LED headlights, and a wider, shallow grille that gives
the car a lower look.
This being the S5, the grille features a
prominent large-scale mesh design set into a bumper with more sporty-looking
egg-crate pattern plastics below it and vertical intakes positioned under each
corner of the front bumper. The rear features the S5’s tell-tale two pairs of
tailpipes, a tiny trunk-lid spoiler, and what we think is a horizontal light
bar connecting the two LED taillights.
An evolution of today’s MLB Evo platform
is hiding under the skin, and we’re expecting U.S. cars to also carry over the
current S4/S5’s 3.0-liter V6, albeit with a higher horsepower count than the
349 hp in current models. And despite the marked drop in
demand for diesel vehicles in the EU, intel suggests the next Euro S5 Sportback
will continue with a version of the 337 hp 3.0-liter
turbodiesel V6 it currently uses (the European S5 cabrio takes a petrol V6).
Whatever engines the S5 ends up with, you can be sure they’ll send their power
to all four wheels via an automatic transmission.
