Audi A5 3.0 TDI | Shed of the Week

Back when it was new, the A5 was the sort of thing estate agents dreamed about. Now it's got Shed thinking...

Another SOTW debutant this week in the slightly battered shape of this 2008 Audi A5 3.0 TDI. There’ll no doubt be some A5 stereotyping in the forum which we’ll leave you to enjoy and/or contribute to.

The vendor’s statement that no prep work has been carried out is confirmed by the double dollop of bird poo on the bonnet and the generally dishevelled state of it, but you could easily imagine it looking considerably better after a day’s work. The grey paint makes it hard to tell exactly how many scrapes there are on the body but there are a few. You’d probably want to give the cabin a pretty thorough disinfecting too if you took the plunge and shelled out the £1,995 asking price.

Once you’d done that, learnt to blank out the imperfections and tried not to imagine what sort of treatment it might have had from its four owners over its 161,000 miles, what would you have?

The answer is a rapid and still effective tool that has dated pretty well since its launch in 2007. Featuring visual cues from the Nuvolari quattro concept car that Audi showed at Geneva four years earlier, it was a Walter de Silva design that the man himself regarded as his most beautiful ever.

Sadly our shed doesn’t have the Nuvolari’s 591hp turbocharged 5.0 litre V10 engine, but the 3.0 V6 TDI lump it does have isn’t short of spunk, churning out a manly or indeed personly 369lb ft of torque from 1,500rpm to 3,000rpm. A six-speed Tiptronic auto would have been the normal transmission partner for it but our shed has the relatively rare six-speed manual. With that in place, the 0-62mph time was in the low sixes. Some say 6.2 seconds, others (like the PH ad bot) get even more enthusiastic and say 5.9sec. Either way, it marched along very smartly. Top whack was the usual limited 155mph.

Contemporary testers thought the 3.0 diesel was smoother than the one in BMW’s 335d. Most preferred the BMW’s handling to the Audi’s but they still rated the A5’s turn-in and its understeer-resisting, rear-biased quattro chassis. Even in an unsympathetic journo’s hands, it returned an easy 35mpg and it was a couple of grand cheaper in basic spec than the 335d.

There wasn’t much room in the back of the coupe but its boot was usefully capacious at 455 litres. This is the Sport model so it’s got leather and stuff like parking sensors but it won’t have sat nav. That was a very expensive extra in 2007, £25 short of £2k in fact. Imagine that.

Last February’s MOT test revealed a CV boot defect and one advisory for a worn front tyre, which by the looks of it seems to have been sorted. We’re not told about any service history but the MOT history suggests that most issues have been attended to on the spot, or not long after the spot at any rate. At least one corroded front spring and one leaky rear damper has been replaced in the last year or so.

2007 is about the time that particulate filters first started being fitted to diesels. It’s likely therefore that our 2008 car will have one, which would be a pity as A5s thus equipped have occasionally had issues. Swirl flap linkages and bearings wore out over time and the injectors could clog up if you didn’t give them a good clear out on the dual carriageway every now and then. For those who fret about timing, belts or chains, it’s a chain at the back of the engine with a toothed belt at the front to drive the fuel pump. Shed prefers belt to chain when he’s with the postmistress as it leaves a less obvious imprint on his ghostly-white and surprisingly delicate flesh.

Window regulators were known for failing on these (and on quite a few other VAG products) and they weren’t cheap to fix. Audi spent a lot of time and money mending them under warranty, which was just as well because paying to have everything done on both sides – regs, motors and controllers – would have left you well over £1,000 poorer ten years ago. EGR valves and coolers conked out, again costly issues when out of warranty. Manual cars like this one could develop clutch judder requiring clutch and DMF replacement, once more not cheap.

On the outside, filler flap actuators died, but most were done under warranty and if not they were reasonably easy to fix. Door locks played up but Shed found that these could sometimes be put right with a well-placed dab or two of Brylcreem. That trick didn’t work so well on cars with door handle sensors which didn’t like getting wet.

Shed likes being in coupes as they restrict Mrs Shed’s saucepan swing radius. This isn’t an especially nice one but it could be quite a lot nicer after the application of some decent valeting products and, say, a £500 remap to take it up to 300hp and 460lb ft. The standard emissions rating is 173g/km so the tax isn’t that ruinous at £305, which if correct – a big if – would be thirty quid less than the auto, more than sufficient for a right roaring night out at Spoons.

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Billy_Whizzzz

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150 months