Audi A5 Sportback 3.0 TDI quattro SE S tronic

Wednesday 30 September 2009

Report by Graham Whyte

I defy you to describe a spiral staircase without making a corkscrew motion with your hand. And, try as it might, Audi cannot describe its new A5 Sportback without calling it a coupe. This is confusing, as there is already an A5 Coupe (large C).

But the new Audi is not really a coupe, it is merely a car designed to look like a coupe, but which fails to comply with the traditional definition of such a thing - namely a car with only two doors. Hence Sportback, which Audi goes on to define as a four-door coupe - which is less cumbersome than calling it 'A four-door saloon with a sloping roof, which, at first glance, makes it look like a coupe'.

Except it's not a saloon, either. The A5 Sportback is a five-door hatchback, and joins a line-up of ten other derivatives of the A4 platform: A4, S4, A4 Avant, S4 Avant, A5 Coupe, S5 Coupe, A5 Cabriolet, S5 Cabriolet, A4 Allroad, and Q5. The distinction between A and S models may seem like an exercise in marketing semantics, but Audi maintains that A and S models are sufficiently different to be considered separately.

So then, eleven different cars derived from a single platform: an industry record I would guess, but one that makes sense from the perspective of offering customers the widest possible choice within a single segment - which Audi calls the B-segment, but which the rest of the industry would consider C- or even D- segment.

But this fragmentation is confined to the body styles and vehicle architecture: the powertrains are common currency, and the choice of engines offered for the A5 Sportback - although initially limited to four - are straight off the A4 production-line shelves. And some Sportback models get quattro, and some get 7-speed S tronic sequential 'boxes, and some get both, including the test car: an A5 Sportback 3.0 TDI quattro SE S tronic, which is yours in basic form for £34,020.

If you think that seems quite a lot to pay for an A4 derivative, wait 'til you add on the extras fitted to the test car. Taking account of these, the bottom line exceeded £44,500, which is only five grand or so short of the price of a lead-in A8, and considerably more than the most expensive A6 Avant with the same 3.0-litre TDI engine.

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