RS E-TRON GT vs M5 CS
Supersaloon buyers, is it time to go electric? Audi says yes, BMW says not so fast... Harris has to decide
There’s a new player in the supersaloon game, but how does the leccy Audi RS e-tron GT fare against the BMW M5 CS?
THE YEAR IS 2021. THE WORLD IS JUST RECOVERING FROM A GLOBAL PANDEMIC THAT HAS ALTERED THE WAY PEOPLE WILL TRAVEL FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE. THE DEATH OF THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE IS NOW OPENLY DISCUSSED AND ELECTRICITY IS NOW ASSUMED TO BE THE ONLY SUBSTITUTE.
You love cars, you are lucky enough to have the resources to buy a fast, expensive car, but you want to keep it for a few years. Can you still buy a petrol powered car and be sure it’ll retain some value or do you have to go electric – but if you do, is the infrastructure in place to actually use the car as you need?
And in this parallel universe, like most people, you reach the conclusion that the internal combustion engine is a long way from dead. That most ULEZ will accommodate the very latest Euro 6 compliant machines. So you phone the BMW dealer and say, “I’m going to take that M5, boss, life’s too short.”
“Pop in tomorrow and sort the paperwork!” he says.
That night you see a picture of the new Audi RS e-tron
GT – and you think “Christ, have I done the right thing here?” Because the e-tron is one of those rare automotive tricks – it is so attractive, you could potentially buy it on looks alone. The number of people who have been affected by this precise conundrum must amount to not very many souls, but the basic principle that has affected most lower value, lower performance cars is now proving vexing in new places. I mean is there really an electric alternative to the mighty M5?
Porsche would say there most certainly is, because its electric Taycan is stealing sales from conventional fast saloon cars. And being part of the wider VW family has given Audi access to all of Porsche’s hard work, so it really is quite fair to say that the handily named RS e-tron GT is a rebodied Taycan that has been sent to Audi’s finishing school.
The M5 CS plonked next to it here shares nothing with anything any other carmaker produces. It is a piece of automotive folly whose £140k price tag proves that the world has gone slightly mad because its empirical offering over a much cheaper M5 Competition is both marginal and slightly undone by the fact this car is only a four seater.
Fear not though, the CS is festooned with the kind of details that make people like us get all excited and which most ordinary people would find pointless. It has vast carbon ceramic brakes that save 23kg, it gets the new M3’s superb carbon shelled seats and a fancy new carbon bonnet. Those rear seats are now individual buckets too, which triggers my inner nerd because back in 1990 BMW offered the E34 M5 with a four seat option that made a 15-year-old me jiggle with excitement.
Tyres are a little wider and the whole suspension system has been uprated to better control the 1,825kg mass. Yes, it’s almost all bits robbed from existing cars, but that shouldn’t matter. BMW has made this thing track ready, and as I’m typing this my pal Christian Gebhardt from Sport Auto magazine has just thrashed one around the Nürburgring in 7min 29.57sec, which is a truly silly speed for such a large machine. Oh, and it has yellow DRL strips that make it look a little like a renegade from Seventies Paris. In short, the £38,000 increase over the Competition makes little sense, but once you sit in it, the
CS tugs so hard on the area of your brain marked ‘man-maths’ that the finance documents almost sign themselves.
The Audi is less ostentatious, but it has arguably even greater road presence – like the Taycan its bodywork seems shrinkwrapped over the bodyshell and its Beyoncé hips look silhouetteracer compared to the M5. The car sits low and, viewed at the