What's the difference?
Audi's A5 Coupe and Sportback have always been good looking cars. Yes, yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but seriously, just look at one and tell me it's not handsome.
Happily, the just-updated RS5 doesn't just build on the looks of its more sedate sibling, but on the performance, too, adding near-supercar speed to those supermodel looks.
Sounds like a pretty good match, right? Let's find out, shall we?
It was, of course, inevitable that electric cargo vans would fall in price. Even allowing for the front-loading of running costs inherent in an EV, the fact that many cargo vans are company-owned and, therefore, purchased largely on price, meant somebody would hit the market with a cheapie that did the job.
In Australia, the cut-price last-mile vans include the Kia PV5 EV and Farizon V7E, both with price-tags under $56,000. The Farizon was the title-holder at sub-$50K drive-away, but a newcomer called the Cavan C1 rewrites that script with a starting price of under $45,000, drive-away, for the cheapest version.
A sub-brand of Chinese behemoth Foton, the Cavan brand will be distributed and retailed in Australia by a separate company to Inchcape (the local Foton distributor) and at the moment, there’s but a single dealership (in Melbourne’s south-east suburbs). That will surely change, however, as deliveries ramp up and the word gets out. In fact, as we go to press, a second dealership, also in Melbourne, has been announced.
Good looking, good to drive, and good to simply sit in, the Audi RS5 range ticks plenty of premium boxes. Whether you can live with the practicality pitfalls of the Coupe is up to you, but if you can't, might I suggest taking a wander over to our RS4 Avant review?
The deliberately simplistic styling, sometimes weird cabin ergonomics and slavish devotion to pulling dollars from the end result make us wonder if the Cavan C1 doesn’t represent some kind of a revival of the white-versus-blue-collar occupational class system.
Socio-economic aspects aside, this would be okay if the C1 did everything as well as its peers. But it doesn’t. It does, however, get enough things right and enough things covered off adequately to be a viable tool for a business in the last-mile delivery industry or some other version of the courier game.
But it won’t be as easy to use as some offerings, nor will it be as comfortable over an eight-hour shift. And the way the driver-assistance features are calibrated means the Cavan will very possibly start to wear thin by about morning-tea time. This may bother its operators somewhat. But some fleet managers and CFOs? Not a bit. Which is where the return to that us-and-them thing comes into it.
A metaphor for the planet right now? Perhaps.