Audi RS7 - long-term review

Apologies for the low-rent photoshoot. An impromptu meeting slightly exposed the RS7, y’see.

I spent a week in the facelifted Porsche Taycan Turbo S. Then, while its regular keeper was overseas for a while I seized the chance to swap straight into the Top Gear Garage RS7.

Usually this is impossible. As a powerful international businessman of business, Rowan normally lives in it, chairing conference calls like the BBC’s Les Grossman.

Parked alongside each other on the TG bunker somewhere under London, the RS7 and Taycan made an attractive comparison. Both are long, four-pillarless-door liftbacks. Usually I loathe massive grilles on cars – the auto design equivalent of gold-monogrammed gates outside your house – but the sneering, glowering RS7 made the Mission E-lookalike Taycan look meek.

This Audi shape is phenomenal when enhanced with the wide RS stance and spindly dished 22s. Are these the best looking OEM rims in production today? I think so.

Pity the RS7 rides dorkily high. The Porsche hunkers down on its whitewall wheels. For a ‘four door coupe’ the Audi is surprisingly tall, and its driving position feels like a Q7 when you’ve grown accustomed to life shaving the cats-eyes in the snake-low Porsche.

Are these cars rivals? They’re both the same shape, but the Audi has much more generous space and more cargo room despite mustering one boot to the Porsche’s two.

They’re both monstrously powerful all-wheel drive expresses that don’t require more than two brain cells to achieve Earth escape velocity. Push right pedal, commence teleportation. Skill required? Zero. But the Audi does so chased by snarling twin-turbo V8 cackle, and that counts for a lot. The Porsche whooshes past with what feels like twice the power, not making a sound.

Of course they’re not rivals. Audi’s answer to the Taycan is its closely related cousin, the e-tron GT. Now available with 900bhp+. Which would still leave it trailing in the searingly quick Taycan’s dust.

Still it’s fun to compare cars whose Venn diagram only overlaps a slither. Someone at Land Rover once told me one of the cars the original Evoque pinched most sales from was the Audi TT. No-one thought a miniaturised Range Rover SUV could be a threat to Europe’s best-selling sports coupe… until someone built it.

But I digress: the main reason for the comparison isn’t just the powertrains. There’s another area where the snorting, gargling Audi is the last of an old-school, and the icy-clinical Porsche is the start of a brave new world. Suspension.

Stay with me. I know that suspension isn’t as sexy on a spec sheet as power or torque or downforce. Someone at Volkswagen once told me that the most popular optional extra for a Golf R was the 19in wheel (which made it ride much worse) and the least popular box ticked was the ‘DCC’ adaptive suspension (which makes it ride much better).

Joining the RS7’s seductive body to its stunning wheels is Audi’s RS adaptive suspension. Air ride. You can stiffen it (Dynamic mode), soften it off (Comfort mode) or let the car automatically decide what’s best (um, Auto mode).

None of them are very good. The RS7’s ride is wooden and the wheel control isn’t brilliant. You sense there’s an argumentative conference call going on downstairs disagreeing about what the driver should be told about, and what should be filtered out. The car isn’t a plush bizzniss jet, or a taut sports saloon. It aims for both, and therefore misses.

Porsche has quietly moved the game into a new dimension. The facelifted Taycan has been treated to what I reckon is the biggest leap in suspension technology since McLaren nailed its interconnected hydraulic damping on the 720S. Forget that vaunted ‘bump-hunting road scanner’ tech Mercedes has touted for the S Class. This is the way forward.

It’s called Active Ride Control, and you could very easily skip straight past it on the Porsche configurator as you plunge into paint-to-sample palettes instead. Don’t. This is a very worthwhile £6,291.

I’ll keep this brief: each shock is equipped with twin electric motors which drive twin hydraulic pumps. They independently pressurise the fluid to counteract pitch, prohibit lean and absorb bumps. There are no anti-roll bars or interlinked hydraulic lines.

The down side is the system uses more electricity than Las Vegas, so Porsche can only fit it to its high-voltage electrified cars like the Taycan and Panamera e-Hybrid.

You only notice the leaning-into-corners if you concentrate on it, like travelling on one of those tilting Pendolino trains. But you do notice the sublime ride comfort. The unimpeachable body control. The way the wheels seem to float over scars in the road like a cartoon character hitching a ride on a cloud. The witchcraft that erases speed bumps, as if there’s a planing wedge in the front bumper, slicing them off before they can bother the chassis.

It’s a horrid phrase, but ARC is a game-changer. The RS7 now feels old-fashioned.

I don’t mind that under the bonnet. It’s a tonic. A V8 throwback. Something to savour before the V8s are ripped from our cold veggie hands. But if I decided I wanted a four-door warp factor fastback… I’d want the Porsche, with that phantasmagorical suspension. Feels like a moment, that. It’s the first time I’ve picked an EV over a V8.