2009 Audi Q5 Crossover SUV Review

2009 Audi Q5 Review In what maybe the most competitive sector in the car business, Audi offers this, the Q5 compact crossover, 3.2 V6 and a long awaited new version of their MMI Interface. Let’s check the test. Now the big headline inside is we have our first look at what they called Generation 3 MMI, which is Audi’s interface. There’s good news and bad here in my opinion. The bad is, right off the bad, but we still have this idiotic four-button, four corners of the screen non-sense. I don’t get it, I never will but there it is. They’ve kept that. Luckily beyond that, a lot of things have been improved. First of all, check out the map. They’ve done an amazing 3D rendering. We’re looking there at the AT & T ballpark here in downtown San Francisco. You can actually see the pitcher’s mound and home plate. If you like the smoothness of our graphic fly over here, thank NVIDIA. Its also hard drive based, you got a 40 gig drive in here. The thing in the middle you pushed, it's got tilt abilities. You can move it around and just about any direction. Entering destination has gotten a little bit quicker because the hard drive system. I'm still not a fan of this rotating alphabet and you know, I’d still love a touchscreen. The audio system in our car because we have the Prestige Trim, which by the way adds $11,000.00 in one swoop, includes Bang and Olufsen sound. Fourteen speakers around the cap and each one has little BNO silver trim ring around it, just to remind you what you paid for. 505 watts of power through, I think like a dozen of channels of amplification. The sources we have for our media are called out here and now because we have a hard drive, we can import music to the said drive and that’s the upper left corner. Now as you see the source I’ve got selected as an SD card that lives under here in this little door. Now for what every reason using either a commercial music disk or a disk full of MP3’s, I can't get import from disk to light up at all. My sound control is because I have the BNO audio give me the usual bass-treble balance fader, but I’ve also got some DSP tools which can be good or bad. This one lets you decide where the sound is centered front seats or driver seat or in the rear if you want to be a magnanimous and the audio-pilot is active noise cancelation. Now we had the Audi multimedia interface in here, we’ve got our iPhone on there right now. You can get different pigtails for this, so this cannot just the iPhone, you could put a USB pigtail on there and use your thumb drive. The panoramic sunroof over my head right here is standard on this prestige edition by the way. Behind for the second row, you’ve got a fixed glass panel. Everyone gets a pretty area over head. Now of course, we’ve got $11, 000.00 prestige package, your darn well better get a backup camera and you do luckily. It’s hitting the trajectory information on those yellow lines and of course, you can change the mode of the warning blocks for whether you’re parallel parking like so or whether you’re parking that traditional side by side parking lot configuration. Down here is the Audi drive select. You’ve got an individual which you can customize, converts, auto which is kind of middle or normal, dynamic kind of sporty and what this do is ride hurd over four different parts of the vehicle. The engine power response curve, the aggressiveness and the shift curve of the automatic transmission, the way that the suspension is being tightened up or kept comfortable and the dynamic steering which is how sharply the steering tracks. The individual one is the most fun to play with because you get to go to the car menu here and here’s what you make your own mix. So that’s a very powerful way to configure this vehicle’s behavior. Up here on the engine room, we’ve got a relatively petit motor, 3.2-liter V6 FSI is their direct fuel injections technology. You can hear it, sounds a little like a diesel, right? Those are the injectors making a slightly diesel like noise, it doesn’t print on the cabin but you do here into the hood here. 270 horsepower, 243 foot pounds of torque, 0 to 60 in 6.7 seconds or better and 1823 is your MPG. The Q5’s power plant isn't very exotic on paper aside from direct injection, but it works very well with the tiptronic gearbox. Especially thanks to the genuine effective nature of Audi drive control and of course their Quattro all-wheel drive. Now we found we could push this Q5 pretty hard and enjoy it, even with an automatic transmission. But you have to wonder rather wantingly about the Euro Spec Q5, which gets a 7-speed S tronic dual- clutch. Remember, we have the optional Audi drive control on our vehicle which among other things does run the suspension system. So if you drive a Q5 without that option, you may find the different drive quality. Let’s price the Audi Q5 Prestige. Wow, that’s a lot of money. $49,000.00 based. But remember, 11,000 of that is the prestige trim level which includes just about everything you like in this car. About all you add to that ala carte you’ve seen here to the Audi drive select that four-mode that changes everything about the car, that’s 2950.