I Can’t Stop Thinking About The Original Audi A5 Coupe

For whatever reason I’m in a not-quite-old-German-car mood lately. While thoughts of Teutonic wagons often dance in my head, it’s a coupe from Ingolstadt that’s got my attention. The original, pre-facelift Audi A5 and Audi S5/RS5 are about as attractive and coherent an automobile as I’ve ever seen or driven.

Earlier this week I happened upon a B8 generation A5 trying to execute a three-point turn on a narrow suburban street and I just couldn’t resist staring when it briefly held the perfect, Top Gear Magazine circa 2003 three-quarter stance with the wheels turned ever-so-seductively inward. Even in white, this relatively unadorned base trim A5 looked stunning.

In general, I’m not even a coupe guy. I’ve owned exactly one coupe in my life, which was a Merkur XR4Ti I bought because, well, I had to know. Sometimes you just have to know what a car feels like to own.

Perhaps the A5 is just a German Mustang. A handsome coupe of the kind that most people don’t seem to buy anymore. Perhaps. I think of it as a sort of underrated masterpiece. It is both rational and exuberant in exactly the way a German car designed by an Italian should be.

Let’s Start With The Concepts

My favorite era of Audi started in 1994 with the introduction of the B5 Audi A4 and ended when the company’s motorsport arm last won Le Mans with the R18 e-tron turbodiesel in 2014. Few people ever get one good year, let alone 20 of them in a row, so this is not damning them with faint praise. The company has made good cars since, and I will not fault you if you believe right now is Audi’s best era. You’d be wrong, but there’s so much wrongness in the universe that I can forgive this small oversight.

It’s 2014-2024. It doesn’t get better than that. And if you want to understand why you only need this photo of three 2003-era Audi concepts, all pointing to a bright silver future for the four-ringed brand. On the left is the Audi Pikes Peak Concept, which would become the Audi Q7. On the right is the Audi Le Mans Concept, which came to life as the Audi R8 with delightfully few modifications.

And in the middle? The Audi Nuvolari concept, so named for famed Italian race car driver Tazio Nuvolari. This guy:

Shortly after the photo directly above was taken the Germans would swap racing cars for racing tanks across the borders of Europe, putting a temporary hold on Grand Prix racing for both Audi and Tazio.

While none of these concepts are exactly like the production versions, all of what we think of with Audi design is there in these three cars. The strong vertical and single-piece grille blends into a smooth, gently creased body held up by pronounced fender flares. It’s more sculptural than organic–as if Brancusi decided to ditch bronze for aluminum.

It would take Audi roughly four years to go from these designs to a fleet of road-going cars, and each one is a little triumph. The R8 is probably the better design and the Q7 was the big-seller, but it’s the Nuvolari-inspired Audi A5 that still does it for me.

What’s even more impressive about the design is that, unlike the Pikes Peak Concept, I think the production version is the better-looking version, having dropped the Nuvolari’s too-raked greenhouse that feels a tad too Chevy Cobalt SS.

The Street Car Is Close To Perfect

The great designer Walter de Silva, too, had his own long run of success starting with Alfa Romeo in the ’90s (hello Alfa 156), continuing on through SEAT, and eventually to Audi. He’s said that the Audi A5/S5 coupe is his most beautiful design. I don’t disagree.

He’s described his approach to design as terminating from a “dialectic relationship between creativity and history” where the balance between form and function must rely on form.

Design has always been a discipline that has connected form and technology. Nothing has changed in that respect. But today the design is quite clearly the main focus of attention– it is the most important source of motivation behind a customer’s desire to buy. In other words, design still has to take account of the issue of functionality, but must also convey the brand.

Again. The photo above is of the non-S, non-RS version of the Audi A5. In its most basic form an A5 looks exactly like what an A5 should look like, especially when the wheel arches are filled with five-spoke wheels.

I’ve talked a lot about the exterior, but the same attention to design carries over into the interior. It’s not quite Patrick Bateman levels of minimalistic, as the dual-binnacle gauges offer a bit of flourish, but it’s not busy. It’s as straightforward as the exterior.

Because this is a 2000s Volkswagen product, you get just about every conceivable powertrain the company offered, from a 1.8-liter gas-powered inline-four up offering 158 horsepower to a big 4.2-liter V8 with 444 horsepower in the RS5. There are even a couple of diesels.

The original S5 with the convertible is pretty good if you want a droptop.

I also like the RS5 coupe, which adds the honeycomb grille and ovular exhausts, though I’m still partial to the plain A5 coupe.

In the years I’ve been doing this I’ve probably driven 1,000 cars so it’s possible I’ve forgotten, but as best as I can recall the first A5 I drove was the 3.2-liter Quattro (AWD) with the six-speed Tiptronic transmission. It was a delight.

Even better was this:

Somehow, I convinced Audi of Germany to loan me an A5 Quattro with the 3.0-liter TDI diesel V6. This motor produced a completely reasonable 241 horsepower and 369 lb-ft of torque. I loved the car. Soaking up miles on the Autobahn I averaged around the equivalent of 35 MPG, which is amazing given how fast I drove (and how expensive diesel was in Europe).

My wife and I drove from Frankfurt out to the Nürburging for the 24, then down to Stuttgart to hit up the Porsche museum. Then to Munich for the BMW museum. From there we took a quick trip to see my buddy perform in Cats in Vienna (just as incomprehensible in German), and then back up towards Berlin and over to Frankfurt again.

It was that perfect blend of efficient, luxurious, and just a little sporty.

The last of these cars I drove was an RS5 with Travis Okulski for the old lighting site. We took it to the Tail of the Dragon and I thought Travis was eventually going to kick me out of the driver’s seat:

After my 11-mile run, I turn over the keys to Monsieur Hardigree, and my earlier strikes are quickly rectified. While driving the Tail, Matt somehow manages to put four wheels off the road, just not all at the same time. “How many wheels did you drop off Travis,” you ask? None, I put none wheels off the road. Matt is good humored about it and realizes that maybe he should pay attention to this road instead of trying to compare this with his other roads. I’m only slightly terrified.

The Dragon is about concentration and it just isn’t there. This car is really, really good, but it isn’t a magician that can keep you from crashing.

I distinctly remember Travis initially not being able to figure out how to engage launch control, so I reached for the owner’s manual and tried to explain the steps involved. Before I could get the words “release the brakes” he was already taking off, thus shoving all the contents of the glovebox into my lap.

That car was a riot. There’s probably no bad version of the B8, though Audi mechanics may have some ideas. The S5 is likely the sweet spot, but there’s something about the simple lines of the A5 I can’t get out of my head.

The Audi A5 is now a sedan and it looks good. There’s a bit of the de Silva design in there. I don’t think it’s perfect, but I’m hoping it’s a step in the right direction. If anything, the Audis of this generation were so perfect that it felt like blasphemy to make a design that departed too much from the original. It was a correct instinct probably taken too far.

Did this drive down memory lane force me to go look to see if there were any for sale? Absolutely. There were fewer than I’d expected. Not a good sign.

Put the armor where there are no bullet holes. Don’t buy the German cars you can’t find for sale.