Born on 12 October, 1868, August Horch was a German automobile pioneer who became the founder of a car manufacturing concern that eventually morphed into what is the Audi today. Starting off as an engineer working for Karl Benz (of Mercedes-Benz fame) in 1896, Horch branched out on his own in 1899, founding A. Horch & Cie. The first Horch car was built in 1901, and after some moves, the company settled down in Zwickau in 1904.
The Horch cars were considered more advanced and superior to those then being built by either Mercedes or Benz (who were then separate carmakers). An early design was a 20hp four cylinder car with shaft drive. In 1904, Horch, due to financial reasons, was forced to convert the firm into a joint stock company, A. Horch & Cie Motorwagen-Werke AG. Following a dispute with his partners, Horch left the company in 1909 and set up in competition in Zwickau itself. His new firm was called HorchAutomobil-Werke GmbH, but following a legal dispute over the name, he had to rechristen the company ‘Audi Automobilwerke GmbH’ in 1910, Audi being the Latin equivalent of Horchen, which roughly translates as ‘eavesdropping’! Post WWI, as German industry went through difficult times, a Danish engineer by the name of Jorgen Skafte Rasmussen, who had founded another German bike and carmaker DKW, acquired a majority stake in Audi. That was 1928, and by June 1932, Audi, DKW, Horch and Wanderer merged to form Auto Union AG. And for the company’s logo, the management chose to have four interlinked rings, one for each of the founder companies, and which, to date, remains the logo of the only surviving brand, Audi.
Around the same time that Auto Union had come into being, Rasmussen acquired the US carmaker Rickenbacker, specifically the manufacturing equipment for eight-cylinder engines, which was used to make a series of exciting eight-cylinder-engined models for Horch. One of these, a Horch 430 was acquired by the Maharajkumar of Bharatpur, Sawai Vrijendra Singh Bahadur, in 1931.
By 1940, with the start of WWII, Horch as a marquee was phased out, and so was Wanderer, the fourth one. But it too had a chequered past. Starting with motorcycles in 1902 and automobiles since 1903, by the 1930s, the Wanderer was making the W24, a 42bhp, 1767cc four-cylinder. It exemplified German sporting saloons of that period, one of which was the car used by Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. After the war, Auto Union continued car production, but only small DKW vehicles were produced. The Auto Union factory in East Germany also made cars, with the Trabant being made from 1957 onwards. Incidentally, luxury vehicle production under the Audi name plate did not resume until the company was purchased in 1964 by the VW Group.
Kicking off a year-long celebrations on 16 July, Audi marked the momentous occasion with the world debut of the new A5 Sportback, a striking new five-door interpretation of the A5 sports coupé formula that seems to be a fitting testament to a century of boundary-breaking innovation in the fields of car design and engineering
With the purchase of Audi, VW, which, until then, had been making only rear-engined cars, became familiar with more advanced front-wheel drive technology, a system which they adopted across both the Audi and the VW range in the 1970s. In fact, the concept of platform sharing started at that time, with upmarket Audi models being launched first, followed by the cheaper VW derivatives. By the mid- 1970s Audi was selling the Audi 50 and the Audi 80. Audi was also selling the flagship 100 and its coupé version, for which there were no VW alternatives. But Audi really became famous when they launched the Quattro coupé, which went on to dominate the World Rally Championship during the early 1980s. In fact, VorsprungdurchTechnik, or, in English, ‘head start through technology’, became the main strapline and company ethos for Audi since then.
It’s an ethos that has held it in good stead as sales have been on an upward curve ever since, with Audi selling over a million cars last year. And with that same ethos Audi entered the Indian market in 2007, with Benoit Tiers as the managing director of Audi India, selling over a thousand cars in 2008. Kicking off a year-long celebrations on 16 July, Audi marked the momentous occasion with the world debut of the new A5 Sportback, a striking new five-door interpretation of the A5 sports coupé formula that seems to be a fitting testament to a century of boundary-breaking innovation in the fields of car design and engineering. Essentially a five-door hatchback, the new A5 is being called a Sportback by Audi to give it more sex-appeal.
(This article is reproduced from Business India Magazine. It first appeared in our issue dated August 9, 2009)