Cupra Formentor VZ5 review

Second coming of five-cylinder hot crossover finally makes it into right-hand-drive form

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Four years ago, Cupra tested the bounds of its brand and the market’s appetite for pricier and rarer examples of its wares when it launched the Cupra Formentor VZ5. 

This fire-breathing, range-topping,  five-cylinder, high-rise alternative to the Audi RS3 was announced at Cupra's third birthday party. It showed exactly the kind of thing that the brand set out to build: usable everyday performance cars that challenged convention but still didn’t take prisoners. Cupra built a run of some 7000 of them but sadly none in right-hand-drive.

In 2026, however, the second coming of the Formentor VZ5 will include steering wheels on the right to cater to UK customers. The limited run will extend to 4000 examples this time, an estimated 250 of which are expected to come to the UK.

That isn’t a great many cars to move through Cupra’s dealer network, but with prices expected to start at around £60,000, this will still be one of the most expensive cars that the brand has yet sold. It’s near enough RS3 money - and well in advance of what Volkswagen was recently asking for the Golf R Estate.

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DESIGN & STYLING

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Partly because, by design, Cupra makes stealthy-looking, matt-finished, understated performance cars in hues of copper and grey, the VZ5 doesn’t seem to do a great deal to justify that price - not at an obvious level, at least. It’s not your typical red-seatbelted, garish performance car. 

It rides on 20in wheels; sits 10mm lower on its coil springs than a regular Formentor; has special wheel-arch extensions grilles and splitters; and gets a new spoiler and diffuser.

I get that Cupra thinks it’s unlike other performance brands and doesn’t do bright colours but, for cars like this, it should be prepared to break the mould. Offering one punchy shade of orange or green among several wouldn’t have hurt.
Matt Saunders
Road test editor

There are a few downplayed VZ5 badges here and there for the keen eye to spot. Subtle inclusions, too, like carbonfibre door-mirror caps whisper about its status. Likewise Cupra’s six-piston Akebono front brakes, to those who know to look for them. At the rear, the car’s clearest giveaways are the same diagonally stacked quad tailpipes as the 2021 car had.

It’s a mid-sized, low-rise crossover built on the Volkswagen Group’s widely used MQB platform with plenty of visual distinctiveness, so it could be argued that there was no need to gild the lily here. But the design that Cupra has ended up with certainly risks underselling the status of the VZ5. It’s sold in a palette of colours much like other Formentors - dark metallics in black, grey and bronze, with matt finishes if you want them - but nothing that would really stand out in a car park.

INTERIOR

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On its slightly lowered springs, the VZ5 presents a hip point very much like that of a regular five-door hatchback as you climb in. 

Its standard sports seats (more aggressive ‘CupBuckets’ are an option) are fairly easy to settle into up front but don’t offer cushion extension for the longer of leg and have integrated-style head restraints that can’t be adjusted upwards or downwards. Even so, driver comfort is pretty good; the seats are decently supportive during quicker driving; and occupant space up front is quite generous.

In the second row, there’s room enough for adults of average height to travel that little bit more comfortably than they might in a mid-sized hatchback, while boot space is a cut above the going rate for a sub-4.5m car as well.

Cupra eschews conventionally racey material touches, preferring textured dark aluminium trims on the fascia and dark smoked ‘sports pedals’. If you like your fast cars understated and mature, it will be right up your street, but I suspect few would claim to be particularly excited by the decor or ambience.

ENGINES & PERFORMANCE

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Sure enough, the VZ5’s stacked exhausts make an appealing noise – although, funnily enough, arguably not quite enough of it if you’re expecting a really menacing, effusive combustive persona.

The car adopts the ‘EA855’ 2.5-litre five-cylinder turbo petrol engine also seen in the RS3 (and rumoured to be fitted soon into a special-edition Golf R). It’s not quite as powerful here as in the Audi but just as torquey. 

It drives through the same torque-vectoring, clutch-based four-wheel drive system as both the Audi and Volkswagen use, with its rear-axle torque splitter promising top-level handling smarts - and delivering a Drift mode, among many others.

It’s a superb-sounding, powerful, free-revving and characterful engine. Its 385bhp makes this car commandingly, breath-checkingly fast, of course, at both lower and higher crank speeds. It has great initial torque and pedal response but also a real appetite for revs - and a sense of unstoppable breadth of torque that marks it out as something much more special than the highly strung four-pot your money might otherwise have bought.

The thing is, in some ways it’s not quite the transformative influence on the Formentor’s driving experience that you might expect. Cupra has been using ‘piped-in’ electronic engine noise of a decidedly five-cylinder-sounding kind to make its four-pot models more appealing for some time now. A 2.0-litre Formentor, or even a 1.5-litre hybrid one, actually sounds quite five-cylindered when you turn on its Performance or Cupra driving modes. 

Well now, that particular chicken has come home to roost. Because now that Cupra has put a real five-cylinder engine into one of its cars, the upshot doesn’t sound so different or as special as it might.

It could also be louder and more genuine: those quad pipes struggle a little bit to produce the bombastic audible presence you expect, especially at idle and from the kerbside.

RIDE & HANDLING

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Cupra has been quite pragmatic with the VZ5’s suspension tuning, going for spring rates that keep the car keenly level and composed during quicker driving and the contact patches evenly loaded but not totally sacrificing the wheel travel and dexterity you’d hope for in a fast crossover. 

The brand closed a section of Spanish B-road to demonstrate the car’s handling dynamism on its launch event, and it certainly carried plenty of speed, showed plenty of braking power and maintained good handling balance when leant on.

I didn’t have occasion to test the Drift mode, but I'd expect that, being the size and weight it is, the car can’t quite replicate the agility, alacrity or pivoting throttle-on adjustability of the Golf R at its most entertaining. It isn’t a car to wrestle and get surprisingly expressive handling from by doing so, like the RS3. But it is settled and composed, and well capable of carrying the big speeds that its engine can generate without pummelling the road into submission or jiggling your fillings out as some performance SUVs might.

MPG & RUNNING COSTS

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Cupra hasn’t yet confirmed UK prices for the VZ5 or added it to its online configurator, so prospective customers will have to wait a while yet to starting deciding what colour, wheel and trim combinations they prefer.

Company sources have indicated that a £60,000 starting price is highly likely, however, with UK cars expected to arrive in August 2026.

It will clearly be a car for retail buyers shopping with their own money, perhaps topped up by having opted out of their company car scheme – and those buyers can expect real-world economy of about 32mpg, dipping to around 20mpg when you become preoccupied by that warbling engine.

For the record, among rivals that offer more than four cylinders, you could have an RS3 Sportback from £62k or a BMW M340i xDrive Touring from £64k.

VERDICT

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The Formentor was Cupra's bold statement model when it appeared in 2020. Five years after introduction and despite its popularity, it remains a striking design and an emphatic mission statement of a sort. That Cupra has struggled a little to find another gear and continue to develop its brand so successfully with so many fresh products since says a lot about how good a design it was.

And something so good clearly deserves a halo model that all of Cupra’s key global markets can get a piece of. The latest VZ5 version has the mechanicals to stand out as a driver’s car and succeeds in doing so in plenty of respects – at least as much as it seems to have ambitions to. It’s clearly one of those double-take performance derivatives – something that isn’t interested in attracting too much attention but certainly wants to be recognised by the cognoscenti and give its driver plenty to grin about.

This car shows that Cupra has the intent to make some great driver's cars but might still be developing the necessary confidence to really 'put it all out there'. The way it's going, though, that should come soon enough.
Matt Saunders
Road test editor

But it might be just a little too stealthy, understated and mature for its own good. Its five-cylinder engine gives it huge accessible performance but perhaps not as much ostentatious, bombastic character as some might like. The exterior and interior design makes it feel a little like the development of a wider theme, rather than something unique and special in its own right.

The key question is, will Formentor owners with cars to trade in feel like they’ve getting enough extra here – in terms of performance, character, design, status, and at-the-wheel engagement – for their money? In some ways, the answer is likely to be a resounding yes. Some but, I’d wager, not quite all.

Matt Saunders

Matt Saunders Autocar
Title: Road test editor

As Autocar’s chief car tester and reviewer, it’s Matt’s job to ensure the quality, objectivity, relevance and rigour of the entirety of Autocar’s reviews output, as well contributing a great many detailed road tests, group tests and drive reviews himself.

Matt has been an Autocar staffer since the autumn of 2003, and has been lucky enough to work alongside some of the magazine’s best-known writers and contributors over that time. He served as staff writer, features editor, assistant editor and digital editor, before joining the road test desk in 2011.

Since then he’s driven, measured, lap-timed, figured, and reported on cars as varied as the Bugatti Veyron, Rolls-Royce Phantom, Tesla Roadster, Ariel Hipercar, Tata Nano, McLaren Senna, Renault Twizy and Toyota Mirai. Among his wider personal highlights of the job have been covering Sebastien Loeb’s record-breaking run at Pikes Peak in 2013; doing 190mph on derestricted German autobahn in a Brabus Rocket; and driving McLaren’s legendary ‘XP5’ F1 prototype. His own car is a trusty Mazda CX-5.