Back when we first started doing our Best Driver’s Car competition, we needed a mission statement, a way to explain what made the whole thing worth doing as elaborately as we do and why it wasn’t a simple comparison of objective test results and lap times. International bureau chief Angus MacKenzie, then editor-in-chief, laid it out succinctly: If numbers are all that matter, we could just test a Formula 1 car and shut down the magazine. How cars drive, how they feel, how they inspire confidence in the driver—or don’t—matters. On paper, the 2021 Audi RS6 Avant and 2021 Porsche Panamera Turbo S Sport Turismo look nearly evenly matched, but the difference in how they drive is obvious from the first corner.
Let’s start with the paper so you can see what I’m talking about. The Porsche is 2.1 inches longer than the Audi, on a 0.8 inch longer wheelbase. The Audi is a half inch wider and 2.2 inches taller. The Porsche makes 29 more horses and 14 more lb-ft of torque, and both cars utilize a twin-turbo 4.0-liter V-8. Both route the power through eight gears and all four wheels, though Porsche uses a dual-clutch automatic transmission to Audi’s traditional torque converter automatic. The Porsche weighs 39 pounds less than the Audi, and crucially, the Audi carries 3 percent more of its weight on its front tires than the Porsche.
Despite being nearly carbon copies of each other beneath the skin, the performance differential is undeniable once a datalogger is brought aboard. There’s no other way to say it: The Porsche dominates the Audi in every metric. The Porsche is four tenths of a second quicker accelerating to 60 mph in a supercar-worthy 2.7 seconds. That is, legally speaking, insane. It doesn’t end there, either, because, by the quarter-mile, the Porsche has finished a half-second sooner, traveling 3.4 mph faster in 11 seconds flat at 123.6 mph. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that five years ago those numbers would’ve made the Panamera Sport Turismo Turbo S one of the quickest cars on the planet, and it’s not very far down the list today.
Going the other way, the Panamera’s curb weight comes into play. It needs 102 feet to stop from 60 mph, putting it just outside the sub-100-foot supercar range but still 11 feet sooner than the slightly lighter Audi.
The minuscule scale difference does the Audi no favors in handling tests. The 0.95 lateral g it pulls on the skidpad is good, but it’s nowhere close to the Panamera’s sports-car-worthy 1.01 g. Unable to keep up in a straight line or a constant radius corner, it’s no surprise the Audi is 0.6 second slower around the figure-eight course and generates less average g.
As with Best Driver’s Car, the objective tests inform the subjective evaluation rather than dictate the result, though in this case, it’s a distinction without a difference. The numbers very clearly reflect the driving impressions, so much so you actually could call this one from the spec chart at the bottom of the story.
2021 Audi RS6 vs. 2021 Porsche Panamera Turbo S: F1 Car or Muscle Car?
The best sports cars, to me, feel as though they nestle down between their tires and lean against them, not on them. Think of a muscle car sitting up on its tires versus an F1 car sitting down between them. The RS6 never fully hunkers down. It always feels like it’s riding on top of its tires, not between them. It never settles into a groove. There’s less suspension compliance than in the Porsche, and that results in more vertical movement that never seems to fully stop. While it only weighs a tiny bit more, it feels heavy; not good, bank-vault heavy. Just heavy. It especially feels nose heavy. As soon as you start pulling real cornering g, the front tires start screaming. They keep hanging on, but you keep wondering how soon you’re going to have to replace them. In longer corners, it feels like you’re just grinding them off the wheels.
This is where that small difference in weight balance matters. As stubborn as its corporate sibling and rival (which insists on building its flagship sports car with an engine behind the rear axle), Audi insists on hanging the RS6’s engine out ahead of the front wheels. That extra 3 percent of weight-bias works out to about 166 more pounds on the nose than the Porsche carries—like moving a passenger from the rear seat to sitting on the hood.
The good news is, as much as it punishes the front tires, the RS6 doesn’t understeer as past performance Audis have. The Quattro all-wheel-drive system works. At the end of those long corners, you can put your foot down, and the front tires shut up and pull you out of the corner. On the skidpad, it would even send enough power to the rear wheels to throw the car into an easily controlled power oversteer that road test editor Chris Walton called “spectacular.” Out in the real world, though, you just sort of reach the end of the Audi’s capabilities and sit there waiting until you get out of the corner and can get harder on the power again.
“It’s an amazing feat to build something this big and make it go this fast,” Walton said, “but when you lean on it, the Audi is just sort of a mess compared to the Porsche.”
2021 Audi RS6 vs. 2021 Porsche Panamera Turbo S: Brake Stuff
The Porsche is the exact opposite of the Audi. You feel as if you’re sitting on the road between the tires, your butt right at the center of gravity. Walton called it organic, which perfectly captures it. I swear Porsche engineers must spend their nights and weekends glued to nature documentaries and sporting matches, watching how animals and athletes move and change direction at a full run. If you could run down a road at 100 mph, the way you’d run around a corner feels the same as how the Porsche does it. “Imagine a professional athlete playing ball with college kids,” senior features editor Jonny Lieberman said. “The Porsche is simply on another level.”
“I could get in and go without hesitation, it gives so much confidence,” Walton said.
The way you can fling the Panamera into a sharp corner and feel the rear suspension lean into the outside tire, dig in, and launch you out is exactly what I expect from and love about Porsches. It peaks in those joyous little moments when you’re just dancing on the pedals, brushing the brake and the throttle as you sail through a corner carrying the absolute maximum speed possible. The car is right on the limit of drifting wide, and you’re just balancing it until the road straightens and you can floor it again.
“The way it puts power down on the exits is amazing,” Walton said. “The solution is always more gas. Steering provides actual feel as well as precision. The brakes are mighty and also provide feel so I could stay out of the ABS with ease.”
The Audi’s brake pedal is overly sensitive, and the car hates trail-braking, so you have to pick the exact right moment ahead of the corner to nail the brakes and get all your slowing out of the way before you turn.
“I totally over-braked in the very first corner,” Walton said, “because the brake pedal is too sensitive. It makes braking unpredictable.”
By contrast, the Porsche has a more progressive brake pedal, doesn’t mind a trail-brake, and never needs a hard stab of the brakes. You just kiss the pedal enough to bleed off speed as you sail through the corner.
The one failing both cars share is their lack of attitude. For the highest-performance, most outrageous models, they’re both disappointingly demure. Their engine notes are pleasantly grumbly but so quiet you don’t get much encouragement or experiential enhancement out of them. Both are so isolating you tend not to notice how fast you’re going until you’re nearly at the cars’ limits. Considering what both cars are capable of, each could stand a dose of swagger.
“Sigh,” Lieberman wrote in his notes. “I hate the fact that I have to write this, but the long-anticipated Audi RS6 just isn’t the total performance wagon package the enthusiast world had been hoping for. It is the best-looking, so there’s that.”
2021 Audi RS6 vs. 2021 Porsche Panamera Turbo S: C.R.E.A.M.
There’s one big number in the Audi’s favor we haven’t discussed: price. At $73,005 less expensive to start and an estimated $82,000 less as-tested, the RS6 is the bargain of the century next to the Porsche. Audi fans will argue, rightly, that the much more expensive car should be much better in order to justify its price. And that’s the thing, the Panamera justifies its price. The Porsche is as much better as a car as it is more expensive. If you’re of the means to buy a six-figure high-performance station wagon and you genuinely can’t decide between the Audi and Porsche, you owe it to yourself to spend the money necessary to get the better car.
Tough and exotic as it is, an unabashed wagon next to a sleek hatchback pulled and pinched into a wagon shape, the Audi is just completely outmatched by the Porsche. As happy as we are to finally, finally have the RS6 wagon in America, and as much as we don’t want to give Audi any reason to second-guess its decision to import the thing, there’s simply no way it can unseat the Panamera Turbo S Sport Turismo.
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