What was going through the heads of Audi’s engineers back in the winter of 2022, when BMW suddenly invented the fast estate car? The hype around the first M3 Touring was fanatical. Audi’s three-decade heritage of RS2, RS4s and RS6s was eclipsed overnight.
Did they sneer with quiet contentment knowing their next contender would blow the BMW’s horsepower into the weeds, and be blessed with a handling ace in the hole like no Audi before?
Or did they toss and turn and gulp and sweat, aware their challenger's hybrid handicap left its boot pokier than the car it would replace, let alone the vast, unimpeded M3’s? And that despite having almost 100 horsepower in hand, the Audi would weigh in over half a tonne heavier – and end up slower?
Photography: Alex Tapley
RS vs M is an ancient (one-sided) rivalry, but these two are only temporary enemies. The Audi is all new. This BMW will be retired within a year, superseded by two M3s – one hybrid, one entirely electric. Wonder what’s going through the M Division’s pointiest heads right now?
Audi partners will whinge this isn’t a fair fight. The M3 that’s brought me to Austria’s endlessly diverse, relentlessly challenging Nockalmstraße is the stripped, ripped CS: a 15kg lighter final edition with five meaningless seconds shaved from its Nürburgring lap time.
In return for the 'come on then' carbon splitter, the 'say that to my face mate' bloodied nostrils and the 'right, outside now' half-painted bonnet, BMW wants £126,000. That’s a towering £35,000 more than where the RS5 Avant starts. But the Touring tips the scales back in its favour by being (like anyone who’s getting on a bit) wiser and less tech-savvy.
Because this M3 was being readied a decade ago, it comes from that innocent, simpler time when fast cars didn’t have to be hybrids. The M3 CS buries a mighty 3.0-litre straight-six behind its gothic gargoyle face, upped in this last hurrah to 543bhp and 479lb ft. That’s all it can call upon to drive all four wheels, or just the rear half if you’re feeling brave and testosterone-y.
The Audi was dreamt up in the post-Greta, post-Covid, post-trillion-dollar-Tesla-share-price era when car + electricity = default. So, like the RS4 it replaces (let’s not get bogged down in Audi doing a dirty protest over its logical badging) there’s a twin-turbo 2.9-litre V6 dangling way out over the front axle, squeezed in so tightly the front grille’s coming apart at the seams.
That V6 has been boosted by almost 60bhp, but 503bhp and 443lb ft gives the M3 little to worry about until the 174bhp e-motor nestled deep inside Audi’s gearbox dropkicks it past on paper. The result is a junior estate car with 630bhp and 608lb ft. More than a V8 RS6. There are nuclear reactor-fuelled aircraft carriers with less grunt. No wonder the RS5’s muscles bulge out of its wheelarches and ripple around its backside. What a fabulous looking car, all stance and coiled rage, dripping with 'are you talking to me sunshine?' swagger. It glowers at the M3, wondering how on Earth it has possibly ended up slower.
Yes, slower. By the time the BMW scorches from 0-62mph in 3.5 seconds, the vastly more powerful Audi will be puffing along doing 57 and a half. You don’t get something for nothing, and what Audi’s swept under the boot carpet is a 520kg secret.
You notice something’s afoot when you open the back. The BMW’s genius split tailgate with separately hinged window greets you with 500 keen-to-help litres, scalloped wells behind the wheelarches, hidden cellars beneath the floor and a clever quartet of metal strips which make sliding goods inside easy. Rubber inserts inflate after you set off to stop your stuff sliding about. The CS Touring truly epitomises the German car industry at its most gloriously illogical. All common sense, and yet a certifiable lunatic.
The Audi offers… none of these things. Its boot is narrower, slopier, and the floor’s got the hump, because just like its nose is crammed full of engine, its backside is stuffed with batteries. A battery chunky enough to power not one but four Citroen Amis. It musters a 51-mile electric range, but that high-voltage spark ignites a bonfire of unintended consequences.
Besides a mere 361 litres of boot, (the Audi manages 1,302 litres to the BMW’s 1,510 when the seats are dropped not-quite-flat), the bloat nullifies the Audi’s on-paper advantages. Even with the instant wallop of electric torque, the BMW just feels like the faster car. Less responsive, sure – the RS5 can mug the M3 if it’s caught off-boost – but in a street fight out of a second-gear corner, the grizzly-faced, brightly-suited Joker gleefully steals away from the moody Dark Knight, cackling a sharp, metallic rasp to its pursuer’s distant, muted thrum.
The M3’s gearshifts are much crisper as it only has to juggle one power source, while the RS5 mediates combustion and volts, harvests and deploys, grabs a notebook and pocket calculator, does maths, and forgets about the downchange I’ve requested.
Audi’s also had to fit the sort of brakes normally used to halt intercity trains. But because it’s busy funnelling energy back into the battery, the pedal feel can’t match the simpler, single-purpose BMW’s. Audi’s thrown rear-wheel steering at the problem to inject cartoonish agility. And an extra 5bhp motor to excite the rear diff. This vicious circle spins around and around until you get a 2,370kg heffa. Load up the family and whatever you can post into the boot and it’s weightier than a V8 AMG G-Wagen. Sorry, but how is this progress?
Like I said, not a fair fight. Until you change the rules, and the BMW is helpless against the Audi’s versatility. Because it can whoosh about in electrified silence, your neighbours won’t complain when you arrive home late at night doing whatever it is Audi owners are doing out late at night. No-one with a boomy titanium exhaust-tipped M3 CS is having an affair.
If you dutifully charge the Avant up for two and a half hours, and you’re religiously careful with the pathetic 48-litre tank, it’ll average double, maybe triple what the old RS4 gave you to the gallon. If you can swing the RS5 as a company car, it’ll set you back around £2,000 in BiK tax. Try that with the CS and the government trousers £15,000.
The Audi is also a charming daily driver. There’s more soundproofing, less road rumble, and you won’t need the fire brigade on speed-dial to winch yourself in and out of its high-set but squidgy chairs. The M3 driver languishes on the deck in perforated sadism thrones which are so supportive you can’t clamber between the bolster and grotesquely thick steering wheel without a stick of butter and the jaws of life.
The CS makes life needlessly difficult inside. Thoughtful though it is of BMW to leave holes in the chairs to slot your B&Q timber through, anything else you lob inside is going to scratch your precious carbon seat backs. Deleting the armrest saves 0.003 grammes and means there’s nowhere to hide your wallet or keys, so you’re getting broken into. Luckily the thief will be easily apprehended because it’s impossible to exit without triggering a hernia.
Sadly gone are the days when the Bank of England studied Audi interiors for tips on how to make its puny vaults tougher. These days it’s a choppy ocean of lazy piano black trim and screen overkill. But you can at least read the instruments more easily than the BMW’s Picasso hieroglyphs. The steering wheel isn’t made of a swimming pool noodle, and although the BOOST and RS buttons aren’t as intuitive as the M Division’s M1 and M2 shortcuts to your favourite settings, there is at least somewhere to put your elbow.
Faint praise, but the Audi is also better at going slowly. It doesn’t strain at the leash like the M3. Its suspension verges on plush when I descend from the exquisitely smooth roads in the Styrian peaks and go snouting about the foothills on rougher, British-relevant lanes. The CS is the best-riding current M3 thanks to its outstanding wheel and body control and expensive-feeling tautness, but if your school run involves speed bumps, potholes or cattle grids, you’ll want to be in the Audi.
And despite the flab, the complication, and the constant thud, thwack, BANG of the charging cable self-destructing as it flops about the boot, the RS5’s electric avenue isn’t a cynical tax-dodging dead-end. It’s cured Audi of its oldest illness: terminal understeer.
Trying to explain the ins and outs of how a tiny motor somewhere in the differential can create a 1,500lb ft offset in torque between each rear wheel would take longer than trying to find reason in the Audi’s eight (yes, eight) choices of LED running light graphics. So let’s concentrate on how it feels .
All seems normal. You turn in. The steering lacks the smidgen of feel the BMW telegraphs, but the Audi hurls itself in regardless because its forklift truck rear-steer and enormous tyres can momentarily cheat physics. Then you apply throttle. Not in a steady, mediated squeeze but an instant gratification stamp. Historically, the front tyres of the Audi would skitter across the road, yelping in pain as the BMW yee-haas into the distance. But not in the new RS5. The hybrid system isn’t just used for speed here. It’s for sideways.
Booting power at the helpless outside rear wheel, the Audi lurches into great gobs of yobbish oversteer, waggling its inside front wheel in mid-air, getting crossed-up while painting lurid black lines up the immaculate alpine roads. The BMW is beautifully balanced for hooning using classical drifting techniques passed down through the generations, but the Audi responds to brute force and algorithms. It’s more binary, but as it bucks and writhes and shimmies under the immense forces of its own making, it pulls more traction from the surface than the M3. Result? A tyre-pummelling mix of skids and G-force. And at long, long last, the most entertaining Audi driver’s car since the original R8.
The BMW can be more cars in one though. If you want a rear-bias-max-attack mode, it has Defcon ‘4WD Sport’ If you tire of marmalising the rear tyres as you ratchet down the ten-stage traction control, it’ll behave itself impeccably in the bog-standard ‘4WD’ setting.
It just doesn’t do weaknesses, the M3 Touring. CS or not, its hype is truly deserved. So it has to win this showdown: it’s more natural to drive than the at-times forced Audi, and besides being a better sports car, it’s also a superior estate.
But the RS5 Avant is by no means disgraced. It’s the most exciting wagon Audi has built for 20 years, and BMW should fear it. When the M3 regenerates once more, it’ll return to us electrified, heavier, shorn of buttons, maybe with a smaller boot. And the RS5 Avant will be lying in wait, just as Audi’s boffins had planned all along.
Audi RS5 Avant performance Vorsprung
Price
: £109,385
Engine
: 2,894cc twin-turbo V6 + e-motor, 630bhp, 608lb ft
Transmission
: 8spd auto, AWD
Performance
: 0-62mph in 3.6sec, 177mph
Economy
: 72.4mpg, 89g/km CO2
Weight
: 2,370kg
BMW M3 CS Touring
Price
: £120,600
Engine
: 2,996cc twin-turbo 6cyl, 543bhp, 479lb ft
Transmission
: 8spd auto, AWD
Performance
: 0-62mph in 3.5sec, 186mph
Economy
: 26.9mpg, 238g/km CO2
Weight
: 1,850kg
