Audi A5 Coupe – the aluminium future.

Audi has revealed an A5 featuring an aluminium space frame and aluminium body. This points the way to new lightweight Audi models to add to the A8 and R8.

The headline is reminiscent of the ‘Jaguar Land Rover  – Aluminium Future’ story we ran a couple of months ago. But this time it’s Audi who are looking at weight saving initiatives by putting together an aluminium A5 Coupe to demonstrate the weight savings possible.

Audi has taken a standard existing steel-bodied production car as its basis and utilised Audi’s Aluminium Space Frame which reduces the weight of the car body by at least 40% compared to a conventional steel bodied car. The result on the A5 is a drop in weight of 240 lbs (not quite the complete aluminium future Jaguar are working towards).

That weight reduction allows Audi to stick a 4-pot 2.0 litre in to the A5 whilst still maintaining the performance of a 3.2 litre V6 A5. But it achieves the same performance whilst at the same time managing to cut emissions and reduce fuel consumption. Add to this the ability to utilise smaller and lighter ancillaries – with an additional reduction in weight and cost – and it makes a lot of sense for Audi to push down this route.

In many ways it’s surprising that Audi hasn’t moved further down this route already. The A8 has used aluminium for the last two iterations, and the R8 does the same. Even the ill-fated A2 did – but maybe that was its downfall.

So although Audi are saying this aluminium-bodied A5 is just built to show the benefits, you can expect to see something very similar in showrooms before very long.