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Audi

Audi can trace their roots way back to 1889 under the name of Horch. However just a few years after Horch had produced their first vehicle, he was forced out of the company he had founded. The new company name came from Horche’s son, which is Latin and means ‘compare’. The first Audi car had a 2.6L engine and did well on the market and in sporting events. Horch then left his own company for the second time in 1920. However the Audi brand continued and grew in success rapidly.

Before the outbreak of the second world war, Audi joined Auto Union which insolently also had Horch as a member. The auto union logo of four inter-linked rings would become the future logo of Audi. During the war, Auto Union produced Armoured cars and light infantry transport for the German Army.

After the war, came the division of Germany and along with it the division of the Auto Union. After factories were relocated, staff hired and fired, eventually Audi emerged in a feasible state to continue production, they had also retained the rights to the logo.

The Audi image at this time was a conservative one, and so, a proposal from chassis engineer Jorg Bensinger

was accepted to develop the Four-Wheel-Drive technology in Volkswagen's Iltis military vehicle for an Audi performance car and Rally racing car. The performance car, introduced in 1980, was named the "Audi Quattro," a turbocharged coupé which was also the first German large-scale production vehicle to feature permanent all-wheel drive through a centre differential. Commonly referred to as the "Ur-Quattro" (the "Ur-" prefix is a German augmentive used, in this case, to mean "original" and is also applied to the first generation of Audi's S4 and S6 sport sedans, as in "UrS4" and "UrS6"), few of these vehicles were produced (all hand-built by a single team), but the model was a great success in rallying. Prominent wins proved the viability of all-wheel drive race cars, and the Audi name became associated with advances in automotive technology.
In 1985, with the Auto Union and NSU brands effectively dead, the company's official name was now shortened to simply Audi AG.

In 1986, as the Passat-based Audi 80

was beginning to develop a kind of "grandfather's car" image, the type 89 was introduced. This completely new development sold extremely well. However, its modern and dynamic exterior belied the low performance of its base engine, and its base package was quite spartan (even the passenger-side mirror was an option.) In 1987, Audi put forward a new and very elegant Audi 90, which had a much superior set of standard features. In the early 1990s, sales began to slump for the Audi 80 series, and some basic construction problems started to surface.
This decline in sales was not helped in the USA

by a 60 Minutes report which purported to show that Audi automobiles suffered from "unintended acceleration". Independent investigators concluded that this was most likely due to a close placement of the accelerator and brake pedals (unlike American cars), and the inability, when not paying attention, to distinguish between the two. (In race cars, when manually downshifting under heavy braking, the accelerator has to be used in order to match revs properly, so both pedals have to be close to each other to be operated by the right foot at once, toes on the brake, heel on the accelerator; a driving technique called heel and toe). This did not become an issue in Europe, possibly due to more widespread experience among European drivers with manual transmissions.
Audi now make top quality cars and are respected around the world for doing so. Today, the Audi brand is looked upon with much deserved respect because of the companies sound engineering and build history and overall market success.