Audi S5Audi's S5 is classy and characterful, but choose the fuel carefully and carry some spare oil in the bootBy Richard Meaden | May 2008 |
 Three things have struck me about the S5 this month. The first is that it has very particular tastes when it comes to fuel. With super-unleaded getting eye-wateringly expensive, I’ve tried throwing the odd 95-octane fill-up into the mix every now and again. It doesn’t seem to harm the outright performance too greatly, but it can make the V8 feel a bit lumpy first thing in the morning, especially after some sub-zero overnight temperatures. So during the recent cold snap I tried a diet consisting exclusively of super. It was still unhappy on BP Ultimate, which is 97 RON, but switching to the 99 RON offerings from Tesco or Shell made things noticeably smoother.
The second thing I’ve become aware of is that the S5 does like a drop of oil. Carey’s experience over Christmas made me wary of its consumption, so I’ve been checking the dipstick far more frequently. Lo and behold, just the day after filing last month’s Fast Fleet update I checked the level and found it was just south of the halfway mark.
A few days later we received an email from an evo-reading Audi dealership technician who said that the 4.2-litre V8 is known to consume oil at a surprising rate. While some are apparently better than others, most use ‘at least two litres between services’. One car known to him sups a litre of lubricant every 1000 miles, yet amazingly even this fails to breach Audi’s maximum ‘acceptable’ tolerance of a litre every 625 miles!
The third and final discovery is how much I’ve grown to like the S5. At the outset I was sceptical about exactly what living with it would be like, but over the last six months I’ve really bonded with it. Effortless, engaging, rapid and individual, it’s undoubtedly one of the classiest and most characterful cars in Audi’s burgeoning range.
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