5 Used Five-Cylinder Cars For Under £10,000

Engines with an even number of cylinders are soooo cliché, right? Everyone’s so predictable with their inline fours and V8s. The thing is, if you do want to go odd-numbered, there aren’t many exciting three-cylinders around beyond the Toyota GR Yaris and (now dead) Ford Fiesta ST, and nobody’s bothered to build an inline-seven yet (cowards!). That means going for a five-cylinder.

There’s currently a grand total of one five-cylinder car in production, the Audi RS3, with its 395bhp, 2.5-litre turbocharged inline-five. It all sounds very exciting, but it also costs the best part of £60,000, and not everyone has that kind of money to spend on a car.

If you want to pick something up used, your options are still pretty limited, but we’ve scoured the classifieds to pick out a selection of reasonably cheap five-cylinder cars. How many? Five, obviously. Unfortunately, if we’d been completely on-theme and chose a £5,000 budget, our options would have been very limited indeed, so we’ve upped it to a fairly generous £10,000.

Audi Coupe 2.3

We suspect the board meeting where Audi decided on the name of the two-door fastback version of its 80 saloon took place at about 4:15pm on a Friday. Still, unimaginative name aside, the original Audi Coupe was a good-looking thing that went on to spawn the legendary Quattro.

You’re definitely not getting a Quattro for this sort of money, or realistically any of the first-gen cars, but be patient, and a second-gen Coupe, produced between ’88 and ’96, might pop up with a five-pot. Again, you won’t find the turbocharged, four-wheel drive S2 for under £10k, but track down one with the nat-asp 2.3-litre unit, and you’re getting a handsome, usable modern classic, with the added benefit of a weird engine. The 20-valve one made a decent 168bhp, too.

Fiat Coupe 20v

Whoever decided on that Audi name clearly went on to work for Fiat (and possibly Hyundai) in the ’90s, although inexplicably, Fiat insisted at the time that its wedgy two-door was officially called the Coupe Fiat. Maybe someone on the marketing team was a big fan of Yoda.

Anyway, this striking-looking front-drive coupe featured styling by one Chris Bangle, who would go on to redefine/ruin BMW styling (depending on your viewpoint) in the noughties. As well as some four-cylinders, it came with a pair of 2.0-litre five-pots, the most desirable (and thankfully, most commonplace) of which was a 220bhp turbo version. There’s always a few of these floating around, and the modern classic market doesn’t yet seem to have twigged that actually, these were rather good little cars.

Ford Focus ST Mk2

This is probably what first springs to mind when you think modern, affordable five-pot performance car. Ford’s ownership of Volvo in the 2000s meant it could pilfer the Swedish brand’s 2.5-litre turbocharged five-banger for installation in the hot version of the second-gen Focus, and the result was 221bhp of snorty, rowdy and often very orange fun.

Of course, a more powerful version of this same engine would go on to be installed in the Focus RS of the same generation, but have you seen the prices of those lately? Like, seriously? Luckily, the ST is much more of a bargain, and far more commonplace, too. There are literally hundreds for sale at any given time, from as little as £2,500 (although at that price, the ads come with big, scary block capital messages that say ‘READ THE ADVERT FULLY’. Best spend a bit more).

Volkswagen Golf VR5

Oh, what’s that? An inline-five is still too commonplace for you? Well, you insufferable hipster, we have good news. In a move that could only have emerged from the ‘because we can’ attitude of Ferdinand Piëch-era Volkswagen, the German giant made a V5 engine. For some reason.

Rather than a V6 with a cylinder missing, it was a VR5, so featured a single cylinder head and five offset cylinders in two tightly angled banks (so, if you were to draw a line joining each cylinder, you’d get a zig-zag pattern). It was installed in the Beetle, Bora, B5 Passat and SEAT Toledo, but you’re most likely to find it in the Mk4 Golf, where it came in 148 and 168bhp outputs. It wasn’t a particularly good engine, to be honest. Definitely unique, though.

Image: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0

Volvo C30 T5

We simply can’t do a list of five-cylinders without a Volvo of some kind. We were disappointed to find that the mad 850 T5-R seems to have crept into five figures in recent years, and we just featured the later V70 R on a rundown of used fast estates.

The C30 T5 it is, then. Sharing the same platform and engine as the Focus ST, it clothed everything in a much more svelte, restrained body that was somewhere between a coupe, a hatch and a shooting brake. Granted, it didn’t have the same aggressive chassis setup as the Ford, but it did end up with more power – a 2007 update saw it lifted from 217 to 227bhp. It’s far rarer than its Blue Oval counterpart, but can be picked up for similar money.