Shed and Bob the Binman have a little game they like to play whenever they meet up in the Bottle & Gerbil. It doesn’t have a name as neither of them can be bothered to think of one. The rules are painfully simple though. One of them thinks of a car that’s currently on sale, and the other one has to guess the price of it new. If the guesser doesn’t get within 50 per cent of the number they have to buy and then neck a shot of a beverage chosen by their adversary.
The game always results in hilarity, gasps of astonishment and a good deal of outraged shouting, most of that coming from Shed. Being a man of the world, Bob is a bit more relaxed about it and generally remains compos mentis for the duration of the game. Shed on the other hand is well gone almost before the game has begun, guaranteeing a warm welcome from the rough side of Mrs Shed’s frying pan on his eventual return home. This is mainly because Shed is refusing to move on from the '70s, which he insists was the best decade ever. As a result of that he rarely values run of the mill cars at anything above £14,995.
Overall, the pair of them are always surprised at the eye-watering prices of modern cars, but even the more grounded Bob nearly spat his half-chewed pork scratchings all over the pub table when Shed revealed that a new Audi A5 2.0 diesel saloon – still on sale and still a remarkably dull looking thing chuffing out 201hp – has a 2026 starting price of £43,510. Upgrade to an e-hybrid version and the price effortlessly whistles past £50k.
Range-topping RS5 Avant sir, or indeed madam? Certainly, that will be £92k. An RS5 does have over 600hp, so there’s some sort of excuse there, but neither Bob nor Shed can fathom why anyone in their right mind, and that includes fleet managers, would pay £43k or more for a 201hp gen-three 2.0 diesel A5 saloon – a saloon, mark you, not even a coupé, they stopped making them after the gen-two – when they could have a perfectly useable gen-one 3.0 turbodiesel, and a quattro Sport Coupé at that, like the one you’re admiring now for just £1,699.
A5 coupé designer Walter de Silva supposedly said that the A5 coupé was his best design ever. It was based on the Nuvolari quattro (also known as the Audi Lisvina) 5.0 V10 concept car that was unveiled at the Geneva show in 2003. Look it up, it’s quite nice. Whoever bought our September 2007 shed evidently agreed with Walt’s view. It’s a very early A5, especially if you believe Wikipedia which says that production didn’t even start until November of that year.
Whatever, it’s got 167,000 miles on the clock and according to the ad it is an exemplary blend of German engineering and sporty aesthetics that is set for longevity and peace of mind for future journeys. The MOT tester who gave it a pass last week didn’t phrase it exactly like that, preferring instead to dourly note a non-excessive oil leak, one worn front suspension bush and two slightly worn tyres. Some light rear subframe corrosion that had been noticed in 2023 was sorted out sometime between late ’24 and now.
After looking at the pics in order to try and get a handle on the general condition Shed reckons this might be a good ‘un. Leather sports seats and a sunroof should fulfil the ad’s promise of a refined interior combining Audi’s signature luxury with practical comfort, while the manual gearbox could indeed help to deliver a thrilling driving experience while maintaining impressive fuel efficiency, which the internet says should be 39mpg. Shed thinks the VED might be £325, or possibly £410. In either case that’s vaguely bearable. You won’t be left floundering in the wake of much else on the real-world road either with a manly 236hp and a beefy 369lb ft of thrunge at 1,500rpm, numbers which make this 1,600kg car good for a 5.9-second 0-62mph time and a top whack of 155mph.
It’s not all rosy of course. You do need to keep your eye out for oil leaks. DPFs can soot up if you’re mainly chugging around town and EGR valves will block up. Injector seals and bearings fail and swirl flaps stop swirling, putting the car into limp mode. That’s the mode Shed goes into when he’s walking home from the Bottle & Gerbil, just before Mrs Shed firmly grasps his throttle bodies.
Is it any wonder that Shed prefers to live in the past, not just in his attitudes but also in his vehicle choices?
1 / 4
![](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 4 3"%3E%3C/svg%3E)
![](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="https://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 1 1"%3E%3C/svg%3E)