The undeniable high pitched scream of rear tyres that are going full shopping trolley is filling the air of Audi’s test facility in Neuberg.
Which is really saying something, because Eurofighter Typhoons are testing at the local military base. And the shrill of fresh Hankooks delaminating is not coming from an R8, E-tron GT or RS3 but from an S5 Avant.
Because even Audi’s estates are letting their hair down in 2026.. a bit, anyway. A new driving mode called Dynamic Plus is coming to the S5 and the S6 E-tron.
In typical Audi understated fashion, it’s a button on the screen within the Dynamic drive mode setting, but it makes a huge difference. I tried it in the S5 with its 3.0-litre V6 petrol engine, and it really changed the way the thing drove.
Audi’s technical engineers described it to me as being a bit of a drift mode light. It’s very much aimed at the road, whereas that full-on smoke show mode of the RS3 is made for the track.
Fundamentally, Dynamic Plus mode is designed to make the car more rear-biased, allowing more torque to the rear axle and specifically the outside rear wheel to the corner you’re going around. At the same time, it knocks the stability control system (ESC) into Sport mode, which allows for a good chunk more slip.
It’s a peculiar set-up that takes a bit of getting used to. In something lightweight and rear-wheel-drive, there are a few ways to initiate a skid: Scandinavian flick, lift-off oversteer, simply mashing your right foot into the carpet. But with this you mostly do it through the steering rather than the accelerator.
You need to give it an aggressive bung into a corner to really initiate oversteer, and then it’s about keeping the throttle constant if you want to maintain a drifty arc.
There’s safe reliable understeer to fall back on if things go wrong, that is actually quite hard to correct. But the steering angle you can get on when you get it right, even with the ESC essentially on, is pretty amazing. And it’s the kind of thing that you can get your head around in 30 minutes or so.
I never thought a regular S Audi estate would be able to be this rear-biased.
Automatic parking
Audi’s optional Park Assist Pro system is getting a new feature called Trained Parking.
It works a bit like a robot vacuum cleaner: you select a starting point on the car’s infotainment system, show it what to do by driving the route, select an end point and, voilà, it will have learned the route.
If you had a bit of a driveway and a garage, you could easily teach the car to park itself.
It can save five different parking manoeuvres, each up to 200 metres long. And yes, they can be performed consecutively, so you could theoretically get the car to self-park for 1000 metres if you so wished.
AI upgrade
I have experienced an earlier version of Audi’s ChatGPT integration. It involved an engineer asking Audi’s infotainment system (with ChatGPT baked in) how to make a cake. It then gave a detailed answer, albeit through a car stereo while I was driving – not exactly Mary Berry.