Hollywood is amusing from the behind the wheel of the new Audi A5. Ka-thunk the door behind you and all that is loud and colorful is immediately hushed, but still—like a silent picture show.
The A5 has a body that matches those eyes as well. Not since the Audi 80 has the company had a two-door in the midsize category. What Audi’s managed to pull off with its return to the segment is a rare feat among production cars. The A5 manages to look better as a production car than the Nuvolari concept upon which it was based.
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R8 aside, no Audi in recent memory has been this evocative or curvalicious. Even the architectural TT, with all its careful arcs and radii, seems more a product of the protractor than the pen. Not so with the A5: Its full-length character line displays an artful freehand that flies in the face of all slab-sided A-series forebears.
The mark of well-designed car is whether such styling functions smoothly in the real world. Simply open the door of the A5 for the answer. Unlike most modern coupes, the A5 has surprisingly short doors. They make for easy ingress and egress in tight spaces, yet create no visual awkwardness in the overall proportions.
Inside, Audi carries on its tradition of classy, understated interiors. High-quality matte-black plastics are broken up with brushed-metallic accents and contrasted with pale-cream leather in our test vehicle. Some may find these treatments dark and severe, but there is no debating the quality feel of all the switches and knobs and the overall high level of execution.
Thrust is good, but unremarkable. Audi’s 3.2L direct-injection V-6 won’t raise hackles like BMW’s turbocharged, 3.0L or squash your guts like Infiniti’s 3.7L. The lack of a stirring soundtrack is part of the problem: At wide-open throttle, the 265-hp A5 doesn’t whoosh like the BMW or howl like the Infiniti—it just goes. Both of those vehicles also come with slicker-feeling transmissions than the Audi’s six-speed auto. Even though it has paddle-shifters, the A5 really needs the crispness of its homemarket S-Tronic dual-clutch system to go up against the G37’s new seven-speed.
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