Audi RS5 engine confirmed, plus RS5 cabrio

By Tim Pollard (artist's impression by Radovan Varicak)

Motor Industry

13 May 2009 13:44

Audi will fit a refettled naturally aspirated 4.2-litre V8 to its secret new RS5, CAR can confirm. We had previously reported the RS5 would use a twin-turbo iteration of this engine, but a senior source has told us it will not feature forced induction.

We’re told it’s the same high-revving engine that powered the outgoing RS4, albeit spruced up with the latest Ingolstadt know-how. Our previous disclosures are however still accurate, pointing to outputs around 450bhp and 332lb ft, 0-62mph in four-point-something seconds and the possibility of some weight-saving applications to trim a few kilos.

You can watch the RS5 in action in our spy video here.

We can also confirm the RS5 will be launched in showrooms in late 2009 and that a cabriolet version will join the line-up at a later date. It will at a stroke become the second Audi soft-top to wear the RS badge, after the last-gen RS4 convertible.

Sadly, the price of the RS5 family has crept up from our earlier estimates. We had speculated around £55,000, but we hear it will in fact be ‘above £60k’ in the UK market.

It’s not all high-revving, high-performance engines from Audi today. The company has just announced a series of fuel-saving measures, including stop-start and driver assistance measures to boost mpg by encouraging greener driving.

Stop-start will be launched in the last quarter of 2009 alongside energy recovery systems to top up the battery during braking, thereby cutting the drain of an alternator. Stop-start alone is claimed to trim 5g/km from emissions and will be seen first on the A3 1.4 TFSI and A4 and A5 2.0-litre engines with manual transmissions.

Audi plans to trim fuel consumption of its range by 20% by 2012, compared with 2007 levels. So you can safely expect these new technologies to cascade across most of the range in the coming years.

By Tim Pollard (artist's impression Radovan Varicak)