Rants and Raves
ERIK JOHNSON
I love the interior in this thing. The red and black contrast so perfectly with one anoth—What's that? We can't get this color combo in the States? Well, crap. The interior is one of my favorite things about the S5—along with that luscious, powerful V-8; the stunning exterior styling; the slick six-speed manual, and, well, everything else. I loved this car from the moment I sat in it. Complaints? Just a couple: First, some of the interior plastics, while they look quite nice, feel extremely cheap to the touch—the plastic surrounding the nav screen sticks out most in my mind. Second, and paramount, I had to hand the keys over to somebody else.
DAVE VANDERWERP
Why did Audi wait so long to bring back a coupe? The S5 is a positively striking new entry, and it doesn't drive badly, either. Compared with the S4 sedan I drove recently, the S5 felt stronger than its additional 14 horsepower would suggest (torque is up almost 10 percent, however), the six-speed manual feels a bit more precise, the seats are more supportive, and the engine note is louder and more engaging. These are all small changes, but all of them moving in the right direction. Then there's the fashionable interior that makes the current (and much-praised) A4/S4's seem hopelessly outdated.
The one problem is price, which hasn't been officially announced but will likely come in around 60K. That's a bunch more than a BMW 335i coupe, which has similar performance, and awfully close to the much more powerful BMW M3's. But for someone who values style as much as performance, the S5 provides a compromise that's hard to fault.
