Ooooh, preeeety!!!

Since I love cars and I love talking about cars two new cars peaked my interest. The first is the new Audi A5/S5 model that has just been launched in South Africa.

The cars is a four seat coupe that looks as though it’s stolen some DNA from naughty uncle R8, especially in the front section of the car. It’s as though Audi took the front of their supercar R8 and melded it with the body of the A4. They then took two doors out and left us with an achingly beautiful grand tourer coupe. The base A5 comes with a 3.2 liter V6 engine producing 195KW of power. Unfortunately this is ultimately an Audi so extras will be optional and probably not be cheap. The pricing starts at around R454000 which certainly isn’t cheap if you consider what I feel is it’s main competitor, the BMW 3 series coupe. The lower spec 325 only produces 160 KW of power but costs in the upper R300000 range, a substantial price difference. I wonder if a hundred thousand rand is worth an extra 35 kilowatts?

If we look at the S5 you find a truly stunning car. Power comes from the Audi staple 4.2 V8 engine product 260KW of power. Consider the A5 has a 0-100 times of just 6.4 seconds the S5 comes in over an entire second faster a 5.1 seconds. While the car has a wealthy of competition in the form of the BMW 3-series coupe and the new Jaguar XF there is something quite special about this Audi. Considering I feel the same way about the Jaguar this should be an interesting battle in the end.

Ultimately I think the best part of these cars is that they are quite practical in that you can fit four people in the car and there’s space for luggage in the boot. It will be interesting to see how these cars sell.

Also coming from the VW family of cars (VW, Audi, Lamborghini, Seat and Skoda) is the new Seat Ibiza. Very few people know this but the Ibiza was actually sold in South Africa as a Polo Playa when the Polo name was first launched here. Of course the authentic VW Polo is now sold here creating a market for SEAT to sell their cars at a slightly cheaper price than VW. In Europe SEAT essentially sells cheaper versions of VW cars using the exact same engines and technology with a slight trade off in design. In the past few years however, this design trade off has almost faded away with the SEAT brand of cars being quite exciting and rather individualistic.

This individualism can be seen with the new Ibiza. It’s the entry level SEAT so it initially won’t be exciting from a power point of view (a hot hatch is sure to follow) but just look at it! It’s very rounded and sexy, something I would definitely drive. I’ll leave you now with the pictures to enjoy and you can begin to agree with what I see.

Enjoy this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed.