Dyno Run Suggests The Audi RS4 Makes More Power Than Advertised

Well, this isn’t particularly surprising, is it? A modern German performance car - in this case the Audi RS4 - is putting out more power than the official figures claim.

It’s something we’ve seen plenty of times before, with a recent example being the BMW M5. A dyno test for the new all-wheel drive super saloon suggested that it could be making almost 100bhp more at the crank than the Bavarian manufacturer claims.

In the case of this RS4 - a long-term test car belonging to Car Wow - the gains aren’t quite as dramatic: the test reveals it to be making 16hp and 37lb ft more than Audi’s figures. Also, that is an estimated figure derived from wheel horsepower (the primary measurement given by rolling roads), so the increase from the factory figures could be a little less. Or even a little more.

Audi even admitted not so long ago that its cars will generally accelerate faster than advertised. The company’s technical development chief Stephan Reil told Car Advice that “I’ve been in this job for nearly 20 years, and with all the cars I’ve worked on, the performance numbers we published were conservative…I simply don’t want to hear, when you guys write ‘well, they claim 3.9, but we got 4.0’.”