Comparison Tests
From the May 2015 issue
Sports coupes reside in that Rhode Island–sized space between fully indulgent sports cars and eminently sensible sports sedans. To earn its garage slot, a coupe must adroitly juggle three somewhat contradictory attributes: sex appeal, driving joy, and 2+2 practicality.
The three premium coupes in contention here pit youthful cunning against confident maturity. The Cadillac ATS and Lexus RC350 F Sport are the class’s pop celebs; think Justins, as in Timberlake and Bieber. Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood—with 60 years of acting, directing, and scoring to his credit—is the Audi S5 analogue. Roots reaching back to 2007 didn’t inhibit Audi’s veteran sports coupe from busting BMW’s then-new 435i in our 2014 comparison test, so we took it and threw it against these fresh newcomers.
Achieving spec parity for this $50,000-plus trio was a challenge. While the Cadillac and the Lexus both offer four-wheel drive, a core Audi standard feature, ordering that option adds weight and cost we chose to avoid. Also, the S5 is the performance A5, whereas the four-wheel-drive ATS and RC350 coupes are intended more as all-weather interceptors than dry-road speeders, as indicated by the following facts: Cadillac locks you out of the ATS’s most aggressive suspension and Lexus doesn’t include rear steering if you choose four driven wheels.
A V-6 is standard in the Audi and Lexus, so selecting Cadillac’s 3.6-liter six made more sense than going with its power-lean, torque-rich 2.0-liter turbo four. That choice aligns the three power peaks, though Audi’s supercharged-small-displacement strategy gives the S5 a significant torque advantage—325 pound-feet versus Cadillac’s 275 and Lexus’s 277. Most of that extra grunt is nixed by the S5’s prodigious curb weight (3954 pounds), or 70 pounds more than the RC350 and 394 pounds heavier than this ATS coupe.
To winnow the great from the merely good, we ran these two-doors through our test gantlet in California City, California, then mounted a southwesterly trek crossing the San Andreas Fault to Jalama Beach on the Pacific Ocean. Thanks to tectonics run amok, fastidiously maintained national-forest roads, perfect weather, and minimal traffic, we enjoyed hundreds of miles that are worth replicating in heaven. All right, who’s feeling lucky?
