The Audi A5 Sportback Is Coming! The A5 Sportback Is Coming!

Picture an A7, but smaller, and coming to the U.S. next year.

byWill Sabel Courtney|
The Audi A5 Sportback Is Coming! The A5 Sportback Is Coming!
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When the new Audi A5 arrives on these golden shores in 2017, it won't just be showing up in the coupe and convertible forms we've come to know over the last nine years. Audi, it seems, also intends to bring us the swoopy four-door hatchback version known as the A5 Sportback.

“I feel confident that there will be another variant of the A5 that will be a real home run,” Audi of America President Scott Keogh recently told Automotive News. “There’s one we don’t have.”

Unless he's referring to some top-secret SkünkWerks project, he can only be referring to the Sportback. Sold abroad since 2009, the current Sportback never made it to America alongside its two-door brethren in spite of the stateside love for coupe-like versions of more practical cars (which has spurred German carmakers to bring us everything from the BMW X4 to the VW CC).

In its current generation, the A5 Sportback resembles a 5/7th scale Audi A7 but sporting the A5's front end; we see no reason why they'd change that up for the future version, as it makes for quite an aesthetically pleasing combination. Nobody outside Audi knows much in the way of details about the new A5 yet, but it's safe to assume it will share much with the all-new 2017 Audi A4 now arriving in showrooms—including that car's 252-horsepower turbo four and optional, Starfighter-spec virtual cockpit. Also, it will have quattro, because Audi.

If Keogh's remarks are anything to go by (and he's a car company executive, so they'd better be) expect to see the A5 Sportback alongside the new A5 coupe and cabriolet at the model reveal in Q2 of 2017. That's quarter two, by the way, not the miniature SUV Audi will by then be selling.

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