2022 Audi RS3 Debuts With 401-HP Five-Cylinder And Torque Vectoring
The 2022 Audi RS3 sedan will arrive in America soon, sporting a 401-horsepower inline-five with a hotted-up compact sedan form factor.
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Like the original Quattro and the previous-generation RS3, there’s a turbocharged five-cylinder under the hood. The new variant also touts torque-vectoring Quattro all-wheel drive, and it will be available in some markets as both a five-door hatch (Audi says “Sportback”) and a four-door sedan. That said, only the sedan will come to the American market, though Audi stopped short of denying that it was considering bringing the hatchback over, perhaps owing to the cultlike desirability of the RS6 Avant station wagon. Whatever the case, the entire RS3 family promises to be more dynamic than ever.
Both RS3 variants get aggressive new designs. The grille and its gloss black surround dominates the front end, with air intakes in the bumper corners providing additional cooling capacity – all trimmed in an RS3-specific hexagonal mesh. An LED headlight signature with a checkered flag motif does a little choreography when approaching or leaving the vehicle, spelling out RS3 in the matrix. The front fenders get slit-like vents just ahead of the door shutline, and box-style flares over the wheels add a little visual link to the original Audi Quattro.
More aggressive side skirts, a vented rear bumper with the same hexagonal mesh as the front bumper, and a subtle roof spoiler on the hatch or decklid spoiler on the sedan round out the other aerodynamic changes. The kinked-LED taillights have their own lock and unlock animation, and Audi RS–signature dual oval exhaust outlets appear on either side of a gloss black rear diffuser. Finally, the RS3 gets an available blacked-out roof panel for some added evil.
The 2022 Audi RS3’s Lamborghini-like interior gets a standard 12.3-inch Audi Virtual Cockpit gauge cluster and 10.1-inch infotainment display running MIB3, making the compact much easier to interact with. Sporty upgrades include an available head-up display, standard carbon fiber trim, and “RS Runway” or bar graph modes for the tachometer (making it easier to execute properly timed shifts without looking directly at the gauge cluster). RS-signature honeycomb seat quilting is available with red, black, or green contrast stitching, and an interior design pack adds even more red or green accents to the seat corners, dash, and door panels.
Audi claims best-in-class acceleration from the 2022 RS3, thanks in part to its 2.5-liter inline-five that’s turbocharged to within an inch of its life. The global model will produce 394 horsepower (294 kilowatts) and 369 pound-feet (500 newton-meters), but in a strange turn of events, the US model will actually make more power than its siblings on the Continent. With 401 hp on tap, the American RS3 is up only 7 ponies over the Euro version (and the old RS3), but it’s still a nice surprise. Those 369 torques are also up 15 over the outgoing compact sport sedan.
