2018 Audi S5

Reward Yourself.

- Michael Febbo

Sitting in a cafe in Porto Portugal the day before driving the 2017 Audi S5 and I’m thinking back almost a decade to the launch of the first version of this car in Verona, Italy. Audi felt the home of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers emphasized the Italian-inspired styling and the car’s unapologetic lean toward Venetian passion over German pragmatism. The event was held in a countryside art hotel filled with modern glass and chrome sculptures complementing furniture designed by an artist vaguely familiar with human anatomy. The circus-tent striped walls were covered in paintings of strange, naked Cirque du Soleil–like clowns. Although the word Teutonic is normally inseparable from Audi, it couldn’t have been more contrary to this place.

This second-generation S5’s coming out party is in stark contrast to a decade earlier. The host hotel is part of a large industrial compound housing a ceramics factory. The monolithic lodgings are decorated with various shades of concrete. The lightly textured abrasive walls are embellished with beige stone and the open interior spaces are sparingly dotted with furniture best described as serviceable. Strange choice considering the styling of the new car is even more stylish than the last. Whether you like the new car’s sharper creases and sweeping lines more or less than the old car is a matter of opinion. The science says it’s far more aerodynamic with the slipperiest version emerging from the wind tunnel with a CD of 0.25 making it not only a segment leader, but one of the most aerodynamic cars on the road. For reference, the new Prius, which doesn’t so much look like it was touched by the ugly stick but rather fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, only betters it by 0.01 in CD.