Audi
August Horch left the Horch company he started in 1909 and started anew with the name Audi , which is the Latin word for Listen, just as Horch means Listen in German. They built expensive high quality cars but demand in Germany fell away due to the economic situation and as a result were taken over by DKW in 1928. The new owners formed Auto Union in 1932 along with the companies Horch and Wanderer. Post war the factory ended up in East Germany under Russian control, and Audi was able to restart in the West with American funding provided by the Marshall Plan in 1949, this Marshall Plan coming quite a few years after the end of the war in Europe, when it looked like communism could start taking a hold in Western Europe, but we digress! Audi were building 2 stroke DKWs when Mercedes Benz bought the Audi company, but by 1965 the Audi compnay was sold on to Volkswagen who were in need of extra factory space needed to build VW Beetles. Luckily the VW boss liked the prototype front wheel drive car that the Audi engineers had been building, a kind of DKW but with a 4 stroke engine that had already been developed by Mercedes Benz. The Audi 80 (80 bhp) came out in 1966 with an Audi 90 model two months later. The Audi 80 was then discontinued and became the 75, while the lower price model Audi 72 became the Audi 60 which by 1968 had a 55bhp engine. In late 1968 the Audi 100 was introduced which could be supplied with either 80, 90 or 100bhp engines, while the 100S was the most powerful model available with 112bhp. That same year, 1980, saw the groundbreaking 4 wheel drive Audi Quattro which really put the Audi name on the map - "Vorsprung Durch Technik" indeed!
