2025 Audi A5 Is More Expensive Than The A4 It Replaces, But Still Undercuts BMW And Mercedes

The Audi A4 is dead, but Audi’s midsize four-ish-door lives on in the new A5, which also supplants the outgoing A5 Sportback in the lineup. Unfortunately for prospective A4 purchasers, that increment in the model name comes with a fairly substantial price bump compared to the outgoing car. Fortunately, though, it’s a bump that still means Audi undercuts the German competition — if by less than before, with the new car starting at $48,995 after $1,295 in destination fees. 

That’s a $700 drop from the prior A5 Sportback, but a $3,600 jump from the outgoing A4’s $45,395 cost. The new pricing puts Audi right between the BMW 330i’s $47,125 MSRP and the Mercedes C300’s $49,600 cost. Quattro comes standard on the A5, though, and adding all-wheel drive to those competitors bumps the Audi down to cheapest place, with the 330i xDrive and C300 4Matic asking $49,125 and $51,600, respectively. The Audi is also cheaper than BMW’s 4 Series Gran Coupe, which is the closest equivalent to the A5’s liftback body style — the 430i Gran Coupe starts at $50,825, while the AWD version is two grand more. I’m putting a blanket “after destination” on all these prices, because you’re as tired of reading those words as I am of writing them. 

Audi sales haven’t been fantastic recently, having dropped off towards the end of last year, so the higher price of the A5 relative to the old A4 may be a method to bolster profits without having to actually sell more cars. That would be helpful for the company, given that its differentiation approach of “tech” hasn’t worked out so well yet. A new generation of cars means a new change to try and make the technology stand out, but the company is still spending a lot of its press release text pushing the fancy lighting that we can’t legally get in the States. 

It remains to be seen whether the A5 has a killer differentiator to make it stand out among the German luxury pack, but Audi needs to bring something to the table to justify losing out on that $3,600 discount. Buyers always need a reason to buy, and the A5 won’t have cost of entry as that reason any more. What will the next one be?