2018 Audi Q5

From the June 2017 issue

When we last subjected an Audi Q5 to our comparison-test gantlet in 2013, we described its appearance and driving demeanor as that of a dinner roll. How we knew what a dinner roll drives like, we can’t quite recall. We went on to point out that the Q5 was a vehicle that “will offend no one and excite just as many.”

We maintain that we were right back then, and not just because the man who wrote those words is the one now tapping out these.

Right we might have been, but 2013 was also the first year that the Q5 narrowly succeeded the A4 as the sales king of all the Audis in this land. By last year, the Q5 outsold the A4 by roughly 40 ­percent. And that was less than a decade after the sedan birthed the crossover.

Obviously, the Q5’s white-bread bloodlessness is no disadvantage in the marketplace. All hail the Pale King.

For 2018, the Q5 gets not only a new suit of clothes but its first full reworking in the model’s nine-year history. This includes a new generation of Audi’s familiar turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder, now making 252 horsepower and 273 pound-feet of torque, plus a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic in place of the last Q5’s eight-speed conventional automatic and an all-new platform that integrates more aluminum bits.

But like the recently renewed A4 and A4 Allroad, the Q5 is a very familiar all-new car. At a glance, the ’18 Q5 is the same vehicle, the new model being within an inch of the vehicle it replaces in every major dimension. It’s 10 pounds heavier than the old one—that’s the equivalent of 10 pounds of feathers or rocks or grape-flavored Pez—and a closer look reveals a couple of new curves above the wheels, a lazy rolling wave along the sides of the thing. The Q5, like the BMW X3 and the Mercedes-Benz GLC300, is pleasantly inoffensive, soft in shape and in impact. There are more-distinctive-looking crossover options out there, from the edgy Cadillac XT5 to the grotesque Lexus RX.

But there is essentially no air between the German entries in this class. They are near identical in size. The entry-level versions are all powered by turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder engines. They all weigh around 4100 pounds. They all claim to get to 60 mph within a few tenths of a second of one another. And who cares about a tenth of a second in the Trader Joe’s parking lot?

It’s a striking example of convergent evolution. Furthering the push toward indistinguishableness, Audi is touting the new model as a vehicle that has the “sporty characteristics of a sedan with the off-road capabilities of an SUV.” That moves the Q5 into the sphere of sportiness occupied by the BMW X3. Neither of these claims is entirely true, of course.