Audi RS Q8 Review & Prices

The RS Q8 has had a promotion and it now fills the role of flagship petrol-powered Audi, since the R8 was taken off sale. The RS Q8 is an absolute bruiser of a car, with prodigious performance from its enormous engine, yet all of the road manners of a sensible hatchback when you just want to potter about.

Think of the RS Q8 as a strongman with kids. It’s cool, calm and collected when going about its family business, but it’s not afraid to show off its immense power when the moment calls for it.

It’s an alternative to cars such as the BMW X6 M Competition and Range Rover Sport SVR, and it’s got some Italian and British counterparts in the Lamborghini Urus and Bentley Bentayga which the RS Q8 shares a lot of parts with. The trio are all related to the sensible Volkswagen Touareg, but they all bring a distinct flavour to the super-SUV game.

And much like a strongman, the RS Q8 is far from a shrinking violet. A 2024 update brought with it a more chiselled appearance than the slightly bulky earlier cars, but it’s still an enormous SUV with a larger-than-life grille and aggressive matrix LED headlights. It’s got a swoopier roofline than the Q7 on which it’s based, and the rear end is just as striking as the front with an LED light bar and huge diffuser.

Watch: Audi RS Q8 Performance v Lamborghini Urus

Inside is just as grand, if a bit less flashy than the exterior. There’s a large expanse of leather all around you, with a wide gloss black panel across the middle of the dashboard housing a 10.1-inch touchscreen. Below the infotainment screen is an 8.6-inch touchscreen for the climate control, and the driver gets a 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster too.

All of the screens have crisp graphics, are easy to read and haptic feedback means the climate control screen is easier to use on the move than in a lot of alternatives. It’s still not as straightforward as conventional knobs and buttons, but it’s not hugely distracting either.

There’s acres of head, leg and shoulder room in the front and back of the RS Q8. The addition of sportier, more sculpted rear seats hasn’t hampered comfort in the back either. The boot capacity is a smidge less than a BMW X5 M, Mercedes-AMG GLE 63 and Aston Martin DBX, but you still have a cavernous 605 litres to use in the back of the RS Q8.

Much in the way you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, you shouldn’t judge the RS Q8 on appearances either. When you’re on an easy, low-speed drive, the big, angry Audi shuts off half of its engine to improve fuel economy.

It has trick suspension too, so when you’re in comfort mode around town it turns down the sportiness so that you positively glide over broken roads. Four-wheel steering means the RS Q8 handles tight turns in town with surprising competence for a car of its size, but don’t expect it to feel like an Audi A1 when parking.

Turn the settings up a notch and the RS Q8 changes character entirely. Its 600hp 4.0-litre V8 snarls through a pair of oval exhaust tips and propels the behemoth SUV from 0-62mph in 3.8 seconds. The gearbox isn’t quite as quick to shift as the dual-clutch unit in the BMW M SUVs, but it’s as smooth as butter.

Carving through corners in the RS Q8 is a real treat too, with enormous tyres and that fancy suspension combining to give the big SUV prodigious levels of grip and genuinely lively steering. Motorways are a delight, thanks again to the adjustable suspension which enables the RS Q8 to float over bumps and dips at cruising speeds.

From 2024, you could also opt for the RS Q8 Performance model, with an additional 40hp over the regular RS Q8 and swathes of Alcantara inside for a sportier cabin.

For a rapid SUV that can slay supercars one moment and comfortably ferry around a family the next, you can get a great price with our Audi RS Q8 deals as well as a range of exceptional Audi RS Q8 lease deals. There are used Audi RS Q8s available through our network of trusted dealers, or other used Audi models if you’ve not quite made up your mind. We can even help you sell your car when the time comes to make the switch.

The Audi RS Q8 starts at well over £100,000, though there aren’t any different trim levels to choose from. That being said, even at the top of the RS ladder there are plenty of options you can choose from to add tens of thousands of pounds to the price of your RS Q8 - including paint options for nearly £6,000.

The more powerful RS Q8 Performance can be yours for around £15,000 over the regular RS Q8, though you do get a notable power increase for the extra money.

That means the regular RS Q8 costs more than the BMW X5 and X6 M duo, and the RS Q8 Performance is just about cheaper than a Porsche Cayenne Turbo E-Hybrid in both traditional SUV and coupe-SUV form.

Power, poise and comfort are a mega mix, but the RS Q8 still feels heavy on a winding road

In town

You’d expect a heavy SUV with sporting pretensions, enormous 22-inch wheels and wide, sticky tyres to be a cumbersome and uncomfortable thing to drive around town, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The RS Q8’s party piece is its advanced suspension, which can not only stiffen up its shocks for fast driving but it can detach its own anti-roll bar too.

That means each wheel is free to soak up its own bumps without unsettling the rest of the car, which means the RS Q8 takes a beating from lumpy, bumpy city roads like a heavyweight boxer. It just shrugs them off.

You sit high up with good all round visibility, which combined with the RS Q8’s four-wheel steering gives the big SUV a turning circle radius not far off of an Audi A3 hatchback. Tight car parks, narrow roads and three-point turns are of little concern in an RS Q8, but you have to be careful when parking close to the pavement. The last thing you want is that four-wheel steering sending you into the curb and taking a chunk out of your massive rear wheels.

On the motorway

The RS Q8’s air suspension proves its worth on the motorway as well as in town, where it keeps the big coupe-SUV feeling smooth and level, even on bumpy streets. It’s as though the RS Q8’s huge sporty tyres are steamrolling the road ahead of it as much as they're gripping the surface.

It’s not quite as floaty as the non-RS Audi Q8s equipped with similar air suspension setups, but it’s still more comfortable than its BMW and Mercedes-AMG alternatives.

While the cabin is well insulated from wind, engine and exhaust noise, Audi’s engineers haven’t quite been able to defy physics when it comes to road noise. Huge, sticky tyres as standard mean there’s a degree of tyre rumble in the cabin, but it’s not too intrusive.

On a twisty road

When it comes to country lanes and fast bends, Audi’s engineers have done a phenomenal job of hiding the drawbacks of a 2.3-tonne high-riding SUV and turned the RS Q8 into a riot to drive quickly.

Play with the adjustable settings enough and the RS Q8 transforms from a docile family hauler into a lean, mean corner carving machine with minimal body lean around bends and vicious throttle response when you put your foot down.

The Porsche Cayenne and BMW M SUVs may feel a little sharper and more direct, but with its surefooted Quattro four-wheel drive system and 10-piston front brake calipers the RS Q8 fills you with the confidence you need to carry some serious speed on a winding road.

Five adults can travel in comfort, but the roofline robs the RS Q8 of a third row

The RS Q8 comes as standard with Audi’s ‘RS Super Sport’ seats in the front, with a sculpted shape and heavy bolstering to keep you in place when carving through corners. They’re far from bucket seats though, more akin to armchairs for comfort, and the RS Q8 is almost as comfortable on long journeys as its regular Q8 and SQ8 siblings.

Drivers with a bigger build might feel a little constricted after a long drive, but there’s lots of adjustability for both the driver and front passenger to get comfortable. You’ll find plenty of storage room for odds and ends in the cabin as well as a pair of cupholders in the centre console.

Space in the back seats

The rear bench in the RS Q8 is of a different design to the run-of-the-mill Q8s, with more bolstering and stitching to mimic the Supersport seats in front. That doesn’t turn it into a four seater, but the middle passenger might feel a touch less bum support than in regular models.

There's a hump in the middle of the floor, but rear legroom is plentiful and headroom is good too; better than in a lot of RS Q8 alternatives with sloping rooflines. The rear seats also slide forwards and back, allowing you to maximise legroom or to expand the boot by an additional 75 litres at the expense of some passenger space.

A fold-down central armrest contains two cup holders and is a handy elbow perch when travelling four-up, but the door cubbies are still big enough for drink bottles should you be travelling as a quintet.

Boot space

A 605-litre boot capacity puts the RS Q8 roughly in the middle of the super-SUV crowd, with more space in the back than the BMW X6 M at 580 litres, but less than the Range Rover Sport SVR with a generous 647 litres. It’s still an enormous load space though, and it’s a very useful rectangular shape.

You can slide the rear seats forward to gain an extra 75 litres of boot space, and considering how much leg space you get in the back of the RS Q8 the rear passengers are unlikely

The parcel shelf cover has a clever self-folding trick when opening the tailgate, but there’s nowhere to store it should you need to remove it completely and the RS Q8’s rakish window slant means you can't fit particularly bulky items even with the shelf removed.

A stylish, luxurious and sporty cabin is slightly let down by a lack of physical controls, which impacts ease of use on the move

You’d be hard pressed to guess that the RS Q8 has been around since 2020 when you see its cabin, which holds its own when compared to newer alternatives.

It may not have an enormous widescreen display plonked on top of the dashboard, but the infotainment screen is integrated into the dashboard in a rather swish gloss black trim piece with some contrasting silver strips along the top, bottom and middle of the dashboard.

You’ll notice a lack of buttons, as most of the RS Q8’s controls can be found through the touchscreen controls. Where some cars use a single screen to contain all of the controls for audio, infotainment and your climate settings, Audi has given the RS Q8 a separate touchscreen for the heater and air-con settings.

The benefit of this setup is that you don’t need to wade through a slog of menus and audio settings to turn the temperature down or de-mist the windows, and while both of the screens have beautifully crisp visuals they’re still not as simple to use as physical buttons are - especially on the move.

Haptic feedback adds a little certainty to your inputs as you won’t feel a buzz if you’ve missed a control, and it adds a premium feel to the climate control screen.

The driver’s display is fantastic, with an RS-specific font and a lot of configurable options for you to tailor the screen to your specific wants and needs. You can have a full-screen map in front of you with a small speedometer and rev counter, or you can switch the screen into full ‘RS’ mode for extra clear performance readouts. It’s just a shame that Apple CarPlay and Android Auto aren’t compatible with the driver’s display.

The RS Q8’s interior has a premium feel with luxurious materials pretty much everywhere you can touch. You’re surrounded by leather hide and soft-touch plastics, and everything feels solid and well put-together. Granted, that should always be the case in a car that costs well over £100,000, but it’s still nice to know there’s real substance behind the RS Q8’s cabin.

It’s safe to say that a 4.0-litre, twin-turbocharged 2.3-tonne super-SUV isn’t the go-to buy for a die-hard environmentalist, but Audi has done its part to make the RS Q8 as non-polluting and fuel efficient as possible.

A mild hybrid system takes the edge off the RS Q8’s thirstiness, but you’ll still struggle to see the official combined fuel economy of 21mpg on a run. With CO2 emissions of just over 300g/km the RS Q8 is not only in the highest band of vehicle excise duty, but it’s also subject to luxury car tax on top of that. Ouch.

If your RS Q8 is going to be a company perk, then you’ll pay the highest rate of company car benefit-in-kind tax of 37%.

The Audi Q8 and its derivatives, including the RS Q8, received a five-star Euro NCAP safety rating in 2019 meaning the big SUV is one of the safest cars you can buy.

It received adult and child occupant scores of 93% and 86% respectively, and a slew of safety tech such as automatic emergency braking, as well as ISOFIX mounting points in the rear, contribute to the RS Q8's impressive safety rating.

Though Audi has a reputation for solid build quality, and the RS Q8 does feel well put together inside, the German car maker had a poor showing in the 2024 Driver Power owner satisfaction survey where it came 27th out of the 32 manufacturers which were included.

That puts it behind its German alternatives, with Mercedes having finished in 25th and BMW in a much better 14th.

The RS Q8 comes with a three-year, 60,000-mile warranty as standard, which is about as basic as warranty gets in the UK, but you can purchase an extended warranty, which may be a smart move considering Audi’s high maintenance costs should the worst happen.