Mercedes brags on every occasion possible that its S63 AMG is the best car in the world. With a 0 to 100 km/h time of 4 seconds, it's not hard to see why. Rival company Audi has never shied away from a competition, and it has more than enough performance technology at its disposal.
Despite this, in an interview with Car & Driver, quattro GmbH chief engineer Stephan Reil shied away from fighting talk when it came to the challenging the S63. Of course, this has always been the case with Audi's biggest sedan, but now we have a good explanation as to why.
“Any RS would need to offer 20- to 25-percent more power than the same model in S guise. And in this light, an RS8 or RS A8 would not make sense,” the division's boss said. That would mean the RS8 would need to have somewhere in the region of 650 hp.
That would be awesome for us car geeks, but really hard to justify in today's world. Of course there's also the fact that Audi A8 sales aren't as good as those of the S-Class, plus they'd need a bespoke large displacement engine which would be pretty much useless everywhere else.
“Any RS would need to offer 20- to 25-percent more power than the same model in S guise. And in this light, an RS8 or RS A8 would not make sense,” the division's boss said. That would mean the RS8 would need to have somewhere in the region of 650 hp.
That would be awesome for us car geeks, but really hard to justify in today's world. Of course there's also the fact that Audi A8 sales aren't as good as those of the S-Class, plus they'd need a bespoke large displacement engine which would be pretty much useless everywhere else.