The new Audi Q5 takes its shot at the crown ... and doesn’t miss

The Porsche Macan has long been the king of mid-sized SUVs, but Audi has been hot on the heels of its sister brand for years. Does the 2025 Q5 range finally usurp the throne?

Stephen Corby

You really can take an Audi Q5 up and over a mountain and far away from sealed surfaces, if you really wanted to …

3 min read

12:00AMApril 03, 2025

The Weekend Australian Magazine

Theoretically, you could use your hugely costly Air Jordan sneakers to actually play basketball, your Swiss Army knife to survive a Hunger Games-style reckoning, or that expensive, decorative samurai sword to disembowel your neighbour, but that’s not really why you bought any of it. Similarly, you could, theoretically, use an Audi Q5 to do some rugged off-roading, because it is notionally an SUV, and most of them even have Quattro four-wheel drive.

I must admit it had never occurred to me to try this, however, because it would seem both inappropriate and silly, like wearing my one and only pair of shiny dress shoes while shovelling fertiliser or rock climbing.

And yet, when the friendly German bunch from Audi offered me the opportunity to take the brand new Q5 brush-bashing over the hills above Malaga on Spain’s southern coast at the car’s launch, I jumped at the chance. Not just because I thought it would be amusing, and hopefully at least slightly disastrous, but because I thought it would get me away from all the cyclists on the sealed roads.

In Spain, cyclists are an even more common sight than grumbling English people in socks and sandals with aggrieved expressions that whisper aggressively “Brexit was a mistake”, particularly when foreigners like me are talking about in the passport queue.

Trying to find a sweeping mountain pass where I could enjoy the newly fettled and appreciably tautened chassis of the new Audi Q5 without being forced to brake and swerve around sweaty snakes of Lycra had proved almost impossible, so I thought I might as well go and almost enjoy the car somewhere else.

The Audi SQ5 off-road is an enormously enjoyable experience.

This being an Audi, I assumed the off-road section would be about as rough as the recently graded gravel driveway of a polo facility, and while I’m not saying it would have scared a Land Rover, it was genuinely rugged and mildly exhausting after about half an hour, at which point I’d remembered how much I hate this sort of thing (although with the air suspension jacked up by 45mm in Off Road mode, I wasn’t even slightly uncomfortable, so I struggled for things to complain about).

Worse still, it turned out the rock-strewn ribbon of red dirt I was bravely traversing was packed with something even worse than road cyclists – mountain bikers. Trust me, while their fashion choices aren’t as alarmingly sausage-forward, they get a lot crankier when you blast past them in a flurry of rocks and dust. Weirdly, I also ran into a group of bushwalkers carrying their exhausted looking dogs, one of whom leapt down and attempted to pee on my tyre while it was moving (the dog, not the owner). I now know some excellent swear words in Spanish.

Soft-touch surfaces, sense of space and Zen-like levels of comfort.

To distract myself from all this I had a good look at the Audi’s new interior, which is surpassing excellent in terms of the soft-touch surfaces, sense of space and Zen-like levels of comfort. The new Q5 does have a lot of vivid OLED screens, including one that the front-seat passenger can watch cycling videos on, if they’re Spanish. Honestly, it feels a bit like a Harvey Norman showroom.

Audi also seemed very proud to tell us that its USB-C ports now offer 60 watts of power in the front and 100w in the rear, which tells you something about the priorities of modern consumers. I was more interested to note that they claim the new car offers a wider range of adaptability between its Comfort and Sport settings, which is true.

The most exciting and desirable SQ5 range-topper (pictured here) can be smooth and quiet in its Balanced mode, or its old-school 3.0-litre V6 can make glorious and thrilling metallic howls in Sport.

You can currently only have your Macan in EV flavour, while the Q5 offers many options, and at a much cheaper price.

I didn’t like the diesel version (it sounded almost British in its droning unhappiness), but the more sensible 2.0-litre petrol engine had enough zest to be fun as well.

Overall, the new Q5 felt more like a Q8 than it used to in terms of comfort and ambience, and yet, thanks to the all-new platform and chassis it rides on, it also felt more like a Q3 to throw at corners, and around cyclists. The Porsche Macan is still the king of mid-sized SUVs, but Audi has sidled a little closer to its sister brand’s efforts here, although its steering remains, as ever, just a touch light on in terms of feedback.

You can currently only have your Macan in EV flavour, while the Q5 offers many options, and at a much cheaper price. When the new one arrives later this year the entry level is likely to be around $75,000, the 2.0 petrol close to $90k and the properly fun SQ5 variant $125k. I must say I was almost alarmed at how much I enjoyed driving this one – it is an SUV, after all.

Perhaps most surprising of all, though, was my discovery that you really could take a new Audi Q5 up and over a mountain and far away from sealed surfaces, if you really wanted to. You won’t, of course (no one will), but you could.