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DRIVEN: Refined Audi S5 Delivers Speedy Fun
V8 power combined with agile handling makes this luxury coupe a pleasure to drive.
Bob Golfen  |  Posted December 22, 2009   Phoenix, AZ
The Audi S5 luxury/performance coupe looks sleek and suitably aggressive. (Photo: Bob Golfen)
Sleek, sophisticated and quite fast, the Audi S5 carves a stealthy presence among the sporty showboats in its class.

S5 is built for those who don’t need to shout out to the world that they are driving a performance coupe, except when they get on the throttle and disappear into the distance with a subdued roar.

With the 354-horsepower V8, the compact S5 is a powerful luxury car befitting its $50,000-plus price tag. It’s also a stylish coupe with gracefully flowing lines accented by an aggressive stance and glowering front end. Its no-nonsense attitude should appeal to the adult driving enthusiasts while leaving the boy racers longing for flares and spoilers.

The performance version of Audi’s lovely A5 coupe, S5 comes with assorted tweaks to the suspension, steering and brakes that allow it to glide effortlessly through S turns and corner like a panther.

Clean, crisp lines define the Audi's sleeek body style. (Photo: Bob Golfen)
The last time I drove one of these was when it first came out as a 2008 model. I was impressed that time with the handsome styling, businesslike interior and sporty performance.

But there was a major clinker in the mix: the steering on the S5 was twitchy and numb. It hunted unpleasantly on road grooves and imperfections, I wrote, and took too much concentration on the highway “to not veer all over your lane.”

Happily, Audi seems to have conquered this flaw. The steering on the 2010 model that I drove felt firm and communicative, highly responsive yet nicely weighted and balanced.

Overall, S5 behaved like a precision instrument, easy to drive quickly with confidence whether dicing through traffic or driving balls out on an empty back road. And all the while, coddling the people on board in luxurious refinement.

The interior treatments in Audi’s lineup are always a pleasure, with the S5 upping the ante with some racy inserts in the leather seats and shift paddles behind the steering wheel. The gauges and controls are handsome and easy to use, with a large rotating knob in the console helping to keep audio, navigation and other controls at your fingertips.

Other manufacturers who have attempted such controls would be wise to check out Audi’s system. It works well.

As usual, the top-of-the-line S5 comes with Quattro, Audi’s highly effective all-wheel-drive system, with the least-expensive model available with front-drive. With Quattro, you can feel S5 being propelled at all four corners as you accelerate or blaze around a turn.

Audi has a new claim to fame this year: it’s the only major manufacturer that used direct-injection fuel systems on every one of its cars and SUVs for added fuel efficiency and performance.

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