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Photos: 2008 Audi A5
The 2008 Audi A5 is a beautiful coupe with an excellent sound system, making it fun to cruise around in or take on jaunts to the country. But it lacks some practicality with its mediocre mileage and navigation system.
Audi's new A5 brings beautiful coupe styling to the 4-ring brand, but otherwise relies on an existing powertrain and cabin gadgets.
The A5 gets Audi's latest styling element, LED parking lights. These outline the lower half of the headlight casings and make for a distinct look at night.
Although 265 horsepower from a 3.2-liter V-6 should be adequate, the A5 suffers from peak torque that waits for 3,250 rpms to be reached.
The styling of the A5 is truly magnificent, although we found cabin entry a little cramped, and had to pull up our feet to get in the driver's side.
Our car came with some unique looking wheels. These are optional 19 inch allows wrapped in summer performance rubber.
Quattro is standard on the A5, and delivers excellent handling. We love this car's grip in the corners.
Audi delivers a high-quality interior, with refined switchgear and good materials for surfaces.
Audi keeps it steering wheel controls simple, using rollers that also serve as push-buttons.
The six speed manual transmission shifts smoothly, contributing to the refined driving experience.
The MMI controls consist of a knob surrounded by four buttons, which correlate to on-screen labels.
The map resolution is very good with this navigation system, but the fact that they are stored on DVD, and that the system uses slow processors, makes the navigation system lag.
This rotary interface for entering destinations is tedious to use.
One feature we really like about Audis is the display between the speedometer and tachometer. It shows a variety of information, such as this route guidance graphic.
Sirius satellite radio is one of the many audio sources available in the A5
The single CD player reads MP3 CDs.
With the Audi Music Interface, you can play MP3s off any USB drive you connect to the system, although the interface is rudimentary.
iPod integration is also made possible with the Audi Music Interface, and uses this full-featured interface for selecting music.
The optional Bang & Olufsen audio system includes a 10 channel digital signal processor, which upconverts 2-channel stereo sources into 7.1 channel surround.
The Bang & Olufsen option includes 14 speakers in the cabin, comprised of six woofers, mids, and tweeters on each side, plus a center fill in front and subwoofer in back.
The Bluetooth phone system works very well, although we are not crazy about this rotary interface for manual number entry. Fortunately, you can also use voice command or choose contacts from an uploaded phone book.
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