BMW’s new 420i versus Audi A5
Success has long been celebrated – and flaunted – by putting a flashy German coupe on your drive. But, just as BMW launches a new 4-series, has the world moved on?
The ice warning bongs, and over the first few miles – as you work to get some warmth into the car’s oily bits and your brain’s idle tissue – you lose track of the number of layers of unwanted interference between the BMW’s Bridgestones and the road surface. In summer theirs would be a happy and uncomplicated union of generous and consistent grip. Not today. Today there’s water, there’s rain-swept grit and gravel, and there’s mud. There may even be ice. Traction is a concept rather than a given; grip you can lean on frustratingly elusive.
Happy and unbelievably comfortable in the 420i (fabulous heated seats; heated steering wheel, Harman Kardon audio of wondrous power and clarity), it’s easy to go with the flow; drive mode in Comfort, engine and gearbox barely trying. Easy like a Tuesday morning. That lazy serenity does not last long.
The change comes slowly, imperceptibly at first, like a shifting glacier. Subconsciously, perhaps prompted by the badge on the M steering wheel, your rear-wheel-drive, relatively pure and unadulterated (by contemporary standards) BMW coupe gets you thinking about all the rear-drive BMW coupes that have come before. You think about cars like the 2000 CS, with its generous and sublime proportions, cutting through late-’60s Munich trac like a Hofmeister-penned steel shark. And you think of 2002s gently oversteering their way around the Bavarian countryside on weekends.
Suitably inspired, you up the pace. Now Comfort’s too slovenly, so you switch to Sport and dial back the stability control a notch. The mud finally stops, the school-run trac clears off home and you find yourself free on a rural stretch of beautiful B-road.
Two things immediately become blindingly apparent. The first – and there’s no easy way to say this – is that the 420i is criminally underpowered. Initially the 2.0-litre unit feels pretty strong, the turbo torque and deft eightspeed auto combining to let you effortlessly out-swim the commuter shoal. But now, with the space to work the car a little harder, the BMW’s engine runs out of answers. Just as you expect the torque to hand over to the power – at around 4500rpm – absolutely nothing happens. Ah.
So painfully lacking is the 420i for anything resembling straight-line speed that, for a few moments at least, you can think of nothing else, so discombobulated are you by the notion of a £50k sports coupe from BMW with less power than a Fiesta ST (if a shade more torque).
Moments later, fortunately, you also notice that the 420i is sensationally good to drive.
Aware of the car, now that you’re awake and tuned into the messages coming through the 4’s lower, stiffer body, piloting the 420i becomes an immersive, very satisfying pastime, even if you do find yourself working the engine harder than you’ve worked an engine for the best part of three decades. Front-end grip and roll control are particularly impressive, the two qualities urging you to brake less, to trust the front axle more, and to run into corners faster and faster. Do so and you can almost see the engine’s impotence as a blessing, the absence of great slugs of turbo torque lending itself to the kind of smooth, quick lines the chassis excels at. Almost…
The steering rack gives you little by way of actual
At first you’re discombobulated by the notion of a £50k sports coupe from BMW with less power than a Fiesta ST
feedback but it’s so precise, and the rest of the car so RSJ-rigid, that you feel the contact patches intimately. So quickly do you and the car build a rapport that you’re soon judging everything just so, the front biting and the rear axle slurring a little wide over a crest, just as you knew it would, so precisely have you balanced lateral load and throttle position against the December paucity of grip. Perhaps in warm, dry weather the BMW would be a less interesting, more one-dimensional device, with far too much grip given its performance (like my old E90 320si, then). But today, in this filth, the 420i is a perfectly balanced BMW coupe doing its thing, and as we roll into town, the car’s Arctic Race Blue metallic (£670) flanks blasted with road filth but its shimmering brake discs swept clean, I’m grinning in the first giddy throes of love.
We’ve come to the kind of prestige new-build estate you feel cars like this were created for. Handsome new homes with flawless lawns. Neat driveways unblemished by time or leaky sumps. Here and there, on garage walls where you’d expect a hanging basket perhaps, the smug, sleek lines of a Tesla wallbox. There is money here, ambition, and there is Farrow & Ball. And where before estates like this were ghost towns on weekdays, in these strange times there is life; professionals on Zoom calls or out on screen-break runs, endless DPD vans, and us.
Us? The BMW and its Audi rival, the A5, both keen to discover if they still have a place in the world, and in this world in particular. A decade ago you’d have bet your house on it (and that house would have been four-bed, detached and with a double garage for the sunny-days Boxster and the kids’ bikes). But now, in a world besotted with crossovers and PHEVs? A world in which Model 3s and Evoques are the new premium normal? A couple of piston-engined German coupes with price tags to make your eyes water no longer look like such a dead cert.
Ah yes, those prices. The 420i is £40k right out of the blocks. Do what must be done and add the M Sport Pro package (£2500, but worth every penny for its uprated brakes, sublime Harman Kardon stereo and the adaptive dampers), chuck in a smattering of nice-to-haves (you work too hard to have to adjust your seat manually) and before you know where you are, you’re at £49k.
This isn’t the moment at which the Audi rides to our rescue. This S-line 40 weighs in at £47,900 with options. More affordable A5s are available but they’re very slow, aesthetically under-nourished and so minimalist you’re grateful for a seat to sit on. For circa £2.5k more than entry-level Sport, S-line brings bigger wheels (19s as standard), matrix LED headlights, that all-important S-line exterior styling package and sports seats. If you’ve got all day, Audi offers a less powerful petrol engine, the Sport 35 TFSI. But this 187bhp 40 is surely a minimum. It’s mated to a twin-clutch gearbox but drives the front axle alone. You’ll need the fruitier 45 (261bhp) for quattro all-wheel drive, and you’ll need top-spec Vorsprung trim for adaptive dampers. So, front-wheel drive and fixedrate dampers it is, plus manual seat adjustment and not a hint of hybridisation. For nearly £50k. What year is it?
I get it: coupes are aspirational, heart-not-head purchases. While clearly giving very little in terms of value for money, they give generously when it comes to ⊲
Fixed-rate dampers, manual seat adjustment and not a hint of hybridisation. For nearly £50k. What year is it?
style, dynamic flair and the kind of right-badge premium image that’s so important (to some), right? Maybe, but goodness me is the pressure on. Just look – as Jim used to say – at what you could have won. An M Sport 3-series saloon with the altogether more convincing 30i engine (still a turbo four-pot, but with 254bhp) is £40,640. And you need only find a couple of grand more for the 330e plug-in hybrid: 288bhp and 30+ miles of electric range, plus change for fancy paint and a Tech pack or two.
And let’s not even start down the road signposted by the 4’s absence of rear doors. Is the implication not that the rear seats will be for occasional use only? Heaven forbid, then, that you might look instead at the M135i, Munich’s (cheaper) hot hatch with the power (302bhp), traction and spooky torque-vectoring – even Kris Meeke couldn’t crash a 135i – to leave the 420i for dust.
And what if, like perhaps one house in 10 on this aspirational housing estate, you fancied sticking a wallbox on the front of your garage and a Tesla in front of your house? If the flagship Model 3 Performance is out of reach, know that the rear-drive Standard Range Plus (£40,490, 5.3sec 0-60mph, 267-mile range) and the Long Range (£46,990, 4.2sec 0-60mph, 360 miles) are not.
So many reasons, then, not to buy either of these cars. Perhaps, like high street retail, the posh German coupe’s time has been and gone? Nah.
These cars are, in terms of powertrain at least, surely the last of their line, but those lines are as long as they are distinguished, and decades of accrued expertise and big-budget evolution have brought us here: to two cars as impressive as they are true to their marque DNA.
Catch a rear three-quarter view of the A5 and it is, to my eyes at least, a deeply pretty car, and that style only goes up a couple of notches when you climb inside. This (mostly) is how you do a modern cockpit – the Audi’s is a calm, uncluttered interior that feels spacious without feeling empty. The materials are fantastic, from soft leathers to shimmering brushed alloys, and the seats every bit as comfortable as the BMW’s and more handsome, if less passionate in their lateral embrace. Only the new tacked-on infotainment screen jars, feeling like an afterthought amid so much otherwise neatly resolved design. It’s a touchscreen system but not exclusively so, with analogue controls for important stuff like air-con and volume. The good news continues with a panel to the right of the steering wheel that feels positively prehistoric in 2021, with its analogue knobs for display brightness and head-up display location adjustment. Joy! It’s such a relief when, having girded your loins to launch into the touch system, you realise you don’t need to. Think of making change, reach for control (without having to look), make change, drive.
An Audi that fires without a diesel clatter still surprises, given the work the marque did to develop the technology in endurance racing, but it’s a welcome surprise: a petrol purr, even an all-but-inaudible one, is arguably a better fit with the A5’s character.
On the move the A5 is an undemanding conveyance, with an unobtrusive and effective powertrain – the engine is noticeably punchier than the BMW’s, if disappointingly muted without the 4’s fake noise – and impressively high levels of refinement. You could drive this thing for weeks at a time without complaint, the noise levels very nearly as hushed as the bank-vault BMW. I can think of few finer cars for a long and odious latenight (or early-morning) solo mission (except maybe the same thing but with more power and all-wheel drive…).
It’s almost lunchtime, so the sun’s dropping from the sky at a rate of knots and the temperature plummeting with it. Determined to tease another revelation from the Audi, to go with the facts that it’s very comfortable and very handsome, I prod through to Dynamic mode and take control of the gearbox paddles. Snaking across Rutland on an ever-evolving tapestry of light, sun-dried tarmac, dark tree-shaded greasier stuff and whole ⊲
An Audi that fires without a diesel clatter still surprises given the work the marque did to develop the technology
sheets of pure mud, the Audi’s no slouch. The steering’s even more inert than the BMW’s, and you don’t notice just how dead the brake pedal is either until you jump back into the 420i and nearly headbutt the windscreen. But the A5’s passive set-up rides well at speed (less so around town) and controls its mass pretty convincingly.
Clumsy early attempts to acquaint yourself with the handling balance result in long bouts of understeer during which you’re little more than a bemused passenger. (And, you suspect, a raised eyebrow from the car – the BMW, by contrast, delights in such mischief.) Part of the problem (this pilot is surely the bulk of it…) is the rubber-on-tarmac sensation from the Hankook tyres. Or, more accurately, the complete absence of sensation. Their demeanour is one of aloof detachment, and that skaty vagueness quickly leads you to the (erroneous, it turns out) conclusion that the thing lacks grip.
In truth the A5 is an impressive cling-on merchant. There’s pronounced roll across the front axle, certainly after the 420i’s poise, but keep things smooth and textbook and the Audi can be made to fly, helped by an ever so slightly punchier power-to-weight ratio.
But the BMW has more to its repertoire, and for that reason – and several others – it’s the car you long to drive more. Munich’s been doing cars like this for a long, long time, and it shows. If all those little changes over the 3-series (stiffer ’shell, lower roof and centre of gravity, increased negative camber, increased track widths) look minor on paper, consider that every single one meant BMW turning its back on some very attractive economies of scale. Then you realise how serious it is about differentiating the 4-series as a more convincing driving machine; more convincing both than the 3-series with which it shares so much and, in this instance, with the Audi A5. ⊲
You don’t notice how dead the A5’s brake pedal is until you jump in the BMW