Audi’s recent success is borne on the back of the SUV craze. The German luxury car maker has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons lately – stuttering sales, falling profits, lay-offs, and worries over China, not to mention the impending tariffs of Trumponomics – but up till now, while we still kind of have a baked-in mental image of Audis always being low, sleek saloons, it has been selling its taller, bulkier models hand over Bavarian fist.
The Audi Q3 is the brand’s bestselling model in Ireland, but globally it’s the bigger Q5, that has found 2.6 million homes since the first model was launched in 2008. It was a success that, to an extent, passed me by. You all know my general apathy when it comes to SUVs, and while the preceding Q5 was handsome, roomy, and tolerably good to drive, it didn’t really light my fire. An A6 Avant any day, thanks.
However, this new Q5 has, at the very least, turned my head even if it may yet struggle to completely change my mind. While it carries over much of the chassis and engineering of the previous model (Audi has renamed the platform as Premium Platform Combustion, or PPC, but really it’s the old MLB-Evo chassis that dates from 2007) there are nonetheless many changes under the skin.
Speaking of skin, the new Q5 is kind of gorgeous. I can take or leave the fastback Sportback version (why take an SUV and then make it less practical?) but the regular SUV model looks really sharp, with a close cleaving to the look of the all-electric Q6 e-tron.
The impossibly slim lights, front and rear, give the Q5 a mean Clint Eastwood stare (they’re high-tech too, with OLED lighting, and the rear ones can flash emergency symbols to following traffic). The front air intakes on the edges of the bumpers look crass, but our S-Line test car, in the optional Sakhir Gold paint (it looks like you’ve melted a Caramac bar into your coffee, and I love it) looks properly smart.
Inside, the cabin is a mixture of the Q6 and the lower-slung A5 saloon and Avant estate, and that’s no bad thing. It’s here that I’ll make the now-expected gripe about there not being enough physical buttons and about the huge 14.9-inch touchscreen being way too distracting on the move. That is all true, but even so it’s hard not to be impressed by the slick OLED displays and the sharp graphics, while the augmented reality head-up display, projected on to the windscreen, is a godsend on unfamiliar roads.
For now, the Q5 is fairly conventional in its powertrain choices. There’s a 2.0-litre TDI diesel and a 2.0-litre TFSI petrol, both developing 204hp and both with mild-hybrid technology that uses an 18kW electric motor to boost their power and also allow some low-speed electric-only manoeuvring, such as when parking. There’s also a 369hp turbo 3.0-litre V6 petrol engine for the high-performance SQ5. This is a lightly intoxicating engine, with a subdued race-car snarl, 4.5sec 0-100km/h performance, and surprisingly affordable motor tax (€600, which could be a lot worse).
The €111,850 price tag probably counts that largely out of Irish sales, and the 2.0-litre TFSI probably won’t fare much better, given that it comes only with front-wheel drive, not Audi’s quattro four-wheel drive, and it’s also a rather noisy and gruff engine from behind the wheel.
So until the two new plug-in hybrid models arrive later this year – one boasting the same power output as the mighty SQ5 and both with up to 100km of electric range – the engine of choice is the diesel, which just seems ridiculous given the news this past week of Ireland’s looming €26 billion emissions fines.
In isolation, though, this is still a very good engine. It’s smooth, if a touch vocal at times, and certainly economical – Audi claims a believable 5.9 litres per 100km economy and you should easily put 850km between refills. It’s no powerhouse, but with 400Nm of torque it moves things along quite nicely.
To be honest, you won’t much be thinking about the engine when you’re inside the Q5, as the high-quality cabin (considerably better in quality terms than BMW’s new X3) and the exceptionally comfortable seats (in our car they were upholstered in a man-made material called Kaskade, made of recycled plastics, which feels almost halfway between suede and wool – it’s delightful) will lull into uncaring.
The Q5’s options list is enough to give you an attack of the vapours
Space in the back is only okay. The rear seats adjust back and forth by up to 100mm, and the backs of the seat recline, but legroom is only adequate and the large transmission tunnel wipes out any hope of someone getting comfy in the middle rear seat. The 520-litre boot is fine, if not exceptional, but at least on the optional air suspension you can lower the rear of the car to make loading heavy objects that much easier, and Audi has carved out space under the floor so that you can stow the retracting luggage cover when you don’t need it.
Speaking of air suspension, that’s a pricey €3,300 option (the Q5’s options list is enough to give you an attack of the vapours; make sure you’re sitting down before you start reading through it) but it’s definitely worth having, because with it this new Q5 is something that the previous Q5 never was: fun.
Audi has worked hard under the Q5’s skin, stiffening up the steering rack and tinkering with the suspension layout so that while, yes, the chassis can trace its roots back almost 20 years, it now feels sharper than ever from behind the wheel. The air springs give the Q5 a remarkable balance of comfort (aside from sharp low-speed intrusions, which whump up through the wheels) and stability, but while the diesel Q5 in particular has some of that traditional Audi “heavy feet” feeling, it’s also rather agile, and the steering has good weight and feedback.
Presumably few Q5 owners will care nor care to learn, but on the switchback corners high above Malaga, on the way to Mijas (where Audi brought us to test drive the new Q5) the 2.0-litre TDI quattro S-Line test car was remarkably good at sticking the inside front wheel tight into a corner’s apex, and rotating the rest of the car faithfully around that point (helped by a clever braking system that squeezes the inside brakes in a corner to help steer the car in tighter). It’s an entertaining thing to drive, and while the SQ5 is more entertaining still, this TDI version was not disgraced.
There are a couple of issues. The price tag (€71,115 minimum and that’s before you start dipping into the ruinous options list) is one, as is the fact that standard spec is stingy (adaptive cruise on the options list?).
Then there’s another crucial fact – just this week, Audi launched its new combustion-engine A6 Avant estate to the world, while the all-electric A6 e-tron saloon and Avant estate finally went on sale in Ireland.
Pretty much as practical as the Q5, and certainly both prettier and more efficient, both these new A6 models act as a convincing reason not to buy the Q5.
However, while I would still go for the A6 Avant over the Q5, the new Q5’s newfound dynamic sharpness has at least lengthened the pause I’d have to make before deciding.
