Audi RS5, seven-seats for £22k...

... and how many badges can one car wear?

By Cam Tait / Tuesday, 24 February 2026 / Loading comments

Hard to think of anyone who gets genuinely excited about rubber. Just look at Formula 1, a sport where teams endlessly fight to keep their tyres in the elusive ‘operating window’. How exciting. But as you know, whacking a new set of tyres on your own car, especially if the old ones were getting on a bit, can be transformative. That’s proven to be the case for my BMW 435i Gran Coupe and Sam’s NC Mazda MX-5, both of which have recently earned a brand spanking new set of Michelin CrossClimate 3 Sports, so we thought it a good idea to kick off today’s episode of The Gassing Station with our initial impressions and why tyres are more exciting than everything thinks - even you, F1 people.

But that’s just the amuse bouche; today’s pod is really all about the new Audi RS5. Yes, it should be called the RS4, and yes, it’s bewilderingly heavy (2.35 tonnes for the saloon, or over 550kg heavier than the old car), but it’s also considerably more powerful than before at 639hp from a 2.9-litre, twin-turbo V6 with plug-in hybrid assistance. What seems to have caught everyone’s eye, though, is the sheer size of the thing, with the RS5 sitting some 40mm wider at each corner than the old RS4. So you’re getting (quite literally) a whole lot more car than before, and you’ll be paying a whole lot more for it, too. But with the BMW M3 now approaching its sixth birthday and the Mercedes-AMG C 63 tapering toward retirement, there’s no denying the RS5 has arrived at the perfect time.

As for the buying challenge, PHer macron (presumably not the French president) is on the lookout for a seven-seater people carrier within a budget of £22,000. Not only that, it needs to have a decent-sized boot with the rear seats up and is ideally diesel as it’ll cover many miles. Sam’s been clever with this one, picking this fantastic Mitsubishi Shogun for £20,455. It looks properly smart in metallic burgundy, comes with stacks of service history and has covered just 60,680 miles. I, however, have opted for a more left-field choice, but one that nails the brief. It’s a Toyota Alphard, an MPV that was never officially sold here, but it’s like a private jet inside, supposedly has eight seats and floor rails to move them back and forth to open up boot space. Admittedly, it’s a hybrid, though that should mean you won’t have to worry about pesky emissions zones. It’s up for £20,995, but you can head into the topic here to submit your own if you think you can do better.

To round things off, we dive into Pizzaeatingking’s ‘Badge Engineering - How many can one vehicle wear?’ topic. Not to be confused with platform sharing, this is all about models sold by different manufacturers with minimal effort to distinguish them from one another. Think Citroen Relay and Peugeot Boxer vans, or, as Sam suggests, the Toyota GT86, Subaru BRZ and America’s Scion FRS. A little digging reveals the Vauxhall Frontera has been called many different names in its time (not like that), including the Honda Jazz(!) and Isuzu Mysterious Utility Wizard. Yes, really. You can scroll through this peach of a topic here, all while tuning in to our latest episode right here.

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