Instrumented Test
Your typical new-car launch consists of a dozen or so juvenile-minded writers driving cars they don’t own, burning fuel they didn’t pay for, on roads that have in part been selected for their limited police presence. It’s a suitable arrangement for evaluating a car’s major attributes: acceleration, handling, ride quality, interior quietness, and so on—everything except fuel economy. But when efficiency is a vehicle’s top selling point, as it is with the 2014 diesel-powered Audi Q5, automakers do their best to rein in the aggression and keep that message top of mind.
When we first drove its new Q5 TDI late this summer, Audi pulled out an old industry standby created just for this occasion: a fuel-economy challenge, with prizes for the winners. With trinkets on the line—a T-shirt, a keychain, a day-old doughnut; it doesn’t really matter—journalists instinctively sort themselves into one of two camps. The first includes the handful who treat the contest as if they were invited to take a half-court shot for a million bucks, and we fall into the other, shrugging off the game and driving the car as we would any other. (Our technical director, Don Sherman, falls into neither category, preferring to take advantage of every loophole in the rules simply for the satisfaction of stomping the competition into a fine powder.)
It goes without saying, then, that we dipped often and deeply into the turbo-diesel’s 240 horsepower and 428 lb-ft of torque on our drive in Washington, D.C.—and did the same when we recently had an example at our office for real-world testing. With Quattro all-wheel drive keeping wheelspin at bay, the Q5 TDI pulls away from the line on a surge of low-rpm twist good for a 0-to-60 time of 5.8 seconds. For reference, a gas-fired Q5 2.0T we tested for a recent comparo hit 60 in 6.9. In both TDI drive locales, we explored part-throttle passing and accelerator response, probing the limits of where the car calls for a downshift. In many cases, the 3.0-liter V-6 needs only the next lower gear when most gas-powered cars would call for a two- or three-cog downshift. Not that the ZF-supplied eight-speed automatic would mind working harder. The industry-standard conventional automatic in quick shifts and smoothness, it’s as adept at juggling ratios here as it is in countless gas-fed BMWs, Audis, and others. The engine and the transmission are perfectly in sync, delivering assertive thrust that makes the Q5 TDI ideal for slicing through traffic quagmires.
Inside, the TDI sports the same four-spoke steering wheel and revised infotainment controls that were included with last year’s Q5 face lift. The cabin boasts excellent materials, intuitive ergonomics, and great outward visibility, yet the interior styling feels a bit sterile, even by Audi’s ascetic design standard. Shut off the stereo and the HVAC fan, and channel all your concentration into listening for ticking injectors and clattering combustion. You will come up empty-eared. Compared with a gasoline Q5, the TDI radiates a slightly louder but still inoffensive thrum at idle. It’s easier to identify this Q5 as a diesel when the stop-start system restarts the engine with a more pronounced shudder than in its stablemates.
Audi’s Q5 is aimed at the crossover-buying masses, not at enthusiasts. To our tastes, the regular Q5 rolls too much in corners and distances the driver with effortless steering. Yet that wasn’t enough to stop us from finding a rhythm on sinuous Maryland back roads where the Goodyear rubber compensated with exceptional grip, which we were able to quantify in our Ann Arbor example at 0.86 g. Near D.C., we momentarily forgot the Q5’s tall ride height and diesel under the hood and enjoyed snaking through S-bends just below the threshold where the tires start to sing. (The SQ5 aims to bridge the gap between commuter and enthusiast, and the model is even available with a diesel in Europe. Ours will have a 354-hp supercharged gas V-6.)
About that summertime efficiency challenge: We were caught off guard when Audi’s press boss announced that our 35.6-mpg average, weighted with our average speed, won the fuel-economy challenge. Especially because we didn’t do anything to help—it was our driving partner who drove his leg of the route at a playing-to-win pace. (Our prize? A Clean Diesel T-shirt, which now sits among the pile of items we randomly mail to our Backfires members.) We were even more surprised that we had exceeded the EPA’s estimated 24 mpg city and 31 highway fuel-economy ratings by a significant margin. Without someone to balance out our frenetic pace—or an Audi-prescribed route—our test Q5 yielded 27 mpg over 1000 miles in and around Detroit recently. We’d still call the efficiency impressive, given how hard we are on accelerator pedals around here, and the two mileage numbers plus our performance data speak to this crossover’s dual nature—fun and relatively fleet on one hand, fuel efficient on the other. Combine that with the Q5 TDI’s civilized, torquey overall demeanor, and this diesel deserves to be taken seriously.
Update 12/23: This story was originally published as a first-drive report. It is here amended to include instrumented test data and real-world fuel-economy figures.
