Germany’s other luxury brand pushes the right buttons but could have more
Creditable effort from Audi to come out of the shadow cast by Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Porsche but does not quite manage to outdo them
“Vorsprung durch Technik”, as Audi’s celebrated television advertising campaign reliably and entertainingly informed us in the 1980s and beyond.
As everybody knows, this translates as, “Hello from the ugly sister of the Deutsche automotive industry! Thanks to our friends at Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Porsche, motorists sometimes look down on us and call us the poor Teutonic relatives of the autobahn, condemned to drive forever in the slow lane of public apathy while our shiny brethren throw down their towels on the sun loungers of life. And that’s terribly unfair, because we actually make some really good cars. So if you’d just give us a chance … Go on. Please.”
Only some of which, of course, is true. While it can hardly be denied that Audi is overshadowed by its more glamorous home-based rivals at both ends of the market and in the middle, and that any perceived image problem could have become a deep psychological crisis in light of parent company Volkswagen’s tangential relationship with the truth in the damning circus of last year’s emissions scandal, Audi models remain exemplars of engineering and astute design. They must be: they’re German.
And Audi has the historical bona fides to earn it a place in the most discerning garage. The, ahem, driving force behind the founding of Audi way back in 1910 was engineer August Horch. The four overlapping circles of the corporate symbol are not the Olympic rings minus one for guilt by Volkswagen association, by the way, but symbolise Audi and the three other car-makers who aggregated as Auto Union in 1932. Subsequent mergers saw the Audi name become prominent decades later, after Auto Union’s acquisition by Volkswagen.
But never mind the boardroom: out on the road, and track, the opposition has regularly eaten Audi’s dust. The first model of the Volkswagen Polo, the world’s workhorse hatchback, was in fact a rebadged Audi 50; and road and rally car the Audi Quattro was the first high-performance vehicle to feature four-wheel drive. Audi remains famous for fielding some of the most fearsome-looking brutes ever to contest annual blue riband 24-hour race Le Mans – and despite an outstanding 13 victories therein has announced it is to divert its motorsport resources to an eco-responsible future, and electric-car racing.
