90 years of Auto Union

Remembering Auto Union

2022 is the 90th-anniversary year of four auto makers based in the German state of Saxony being brought together to create the once-mighty Auto Union.

That name is remembered only in certain circles nowadays, but nearly everyone will recognize the four-ring badge associated with it, and the Audi brand which now uses it.

Here is the Auto Union story, starting with a quick look at the originally quite separate companies involved.

Wanderer

Johann Baptist Winklhofer and Richard Adolf Jaenicke established a bicycle-repair shop in 1885, and two years later began manufacturing bikes of their own, which were named Wanderer.

This became the company’s trading name in 1896. After that, Wanderer moved into the production of machine tools, motorcycles, typewriters and eventually, in 1905, cars.

Pictured is the Wanderer W11.

Horch

After working at Benz for a few years, August Horch established his own company in November 1899, and began building cars early in the 20th century.

Based at first in Cologne, the company was moved to Zwickau in 1904.

Five years after that, Horch fell out with his partners and left to form another car manufacturer.

Here you can see a 1936 Horch 853.

Audi

Since his own surname was already trademarked, August Horch could not use it again for his new company.

This problem was solved when someone – the son of a friend, according to tradition – suggested audi, which means the same in Latin (‘listen!’) as horch does in German. The ‘ow-dee’ pronunciation was almost certainly not used by the Romans, but it sounds better to German speakers.

Audi was formed in Zwickau in 1909. In that city there is a street named Audistrasse, which contains both a museum and a restaurant named after August Horch.

Pictured is a 1919 Audi Type C.

DKW

The brilliant expatriate Dane Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen came up with the name DKW, which stood for several German phrases including ‘the little wonder’.

He applied it to a series of motorcycles which, due to his astute purchase of a patent for two-stroke engines with the inlet and exhaust on the same side (a system known as loop scavenging), became the most successful in the world.

DKW entered the car market in 1928. Its products in this sector were almost all front-wheel drive and invariably powered by two-stroke engines. They were also cheap, and positioned well below anything built by Audi, Horch or Wanderer.

Pictured is a 1939 DKW F8 Meisterklasse Cabriolet.

DKW and Audi

Although it built the cheapest cars, DKW was by far the most successful of the brands which would become part of Auto Union.

The formation of that conglomerate was still four years away when Rasmussen became Audi’s major shareholder in 1928.

Rasmussen had also taken over the US company Rickenbacker the previous year, and had its manufacturing equipment transported across the Atlantic to Germany.

This led to a crossover of a type which would become familiar in the Auto Union days. The Audi Type SS of 1929-1932 and the Type T of 1931-1932 – known informally as Zwickau (pictured) and Dresden respectively – were both powered by Rickenbacker engines.

The Auto Union

Although a period of terrifying hyperinflation had come and gone, Germany was still in a difficult financial position in the early 1930s.

The state bank of Saxony, fearful that the local motor industry might collapse and take many related businesses down with it, persuaded Rasmussen to help the situation by buying two more companies.

Audi and DKW, already partners, were therefore joined by Horch and the car division of Wanderer in the formation of the Auto Union, which was established in June 1932.

The badge

The Audi logo known around the world today can not be explained without reference to the Auto Union.

Each of the interlocked circles represents one of the four manufacturers which came together in 1932. No particular order is implied, but they are usually quoted alphabetically: Audi, DKW, Horch and Wanderer. DKW, essentially the savior of the other three, was given equal billing.

Paradoxically, while the four rings now form the image of Audi alone, that brand was originally represented by only one of them.

Sharing

Once the four brands had been brought together under the Auto Union umbrella, it was inevitable that they would begin to share technology.

The Audi Front (pictured in roadster form) was an early example. Launched in 1933, it had the same 2.0-liter six-cylinder engine as the contemporary Wanderer W22, though a capacity increase to 2.25 liters in 1935 applied only to the Audi.

Unlike the Wanderer, the Audi also had front-wheel drive, a development which would have been unlikely in this period if the connection with DKW hadn’t happened.

Separate brands

Customers whose involvement with cars didn’t go much further than buying one they liked the look of might have been only dimly aware of the Auto Union situation.

Despite occasional part-sharing, the brands seemed from the outside to exist separately, and retained their previous identities. Starting from the bottom, they were positioned in the market in the order DKW (cheapest), Wanderer, Audi and Horch (most luxurious).

The four-ring logo might appear on any of them, but during this era there was no such thing as an Auto Union production car. There were only cars built by manufacturers which were part of the conglomerate.

Pictured is a Horch 853 Sport Cabriolet.

The Silver Arrows

While Auto Union was not a separate brand of road car in the 1930s, this definitely wasn’t the case in the world of motorsport.

In this case, Auto Union was a more or less friendly rival to Mercedes-Benz. The two marques, jointly referred to as the Silver Arrows, successfully fulfilled Adolf Hitler’s dream that Germany would become the dominant country in Grand Prix racing.

Both companies produced fearsome machines, but the Mercedes were relatively conventional. The early Auto Unions had mid-mounted V16 engines (which reached a capacity of 6.0 liters in 1936), extremely forward-located cockpits and, alarmingly, swing-axle rear suspension.

Few drivers could cope with them, with the notable exceptions of Hans Stuck and ex-motorcycle racer Bernd Rosemeyer. One possible explanation for Rosemeyer’s success is that he had never driven a competition car before, and assumed, for want of any experience to the contrary, that they all behaved the way the Auto Union did.

Later Auto Union racers

The motorsport authorities decided, as motorsport authorities often do, that racing cars were becoming much too fast, and responded by imposing a 3.0-liter limit for the 1938 season.

Apart from forcing the manufacturers to spend a lot of money, the new rules had little effect. The Mercedes and Auto Unions were still dramatically fast, and could still beat everything else.

With a V12 engine and a more sensible seating position, the D-type Auto Unions were slightly less alarming than their predecessors, and Rosemeyer would have had no trouble with them. But Rosemeyer was gone, killed at the age of just 28 when his car was swept off-course by a sidewind during a speed-record attempt in January 1938.

His place in the team was taken by the similarly brilliant Tazio Nuvolari. Nuvolari, who could drive anything flat out and appeared to believe that ‘too much power’ and ‘not enough power’ were more or less the same thing, easily adapted to the later Auto Unions, and would probably have had enormous fun with the earlier ones.

The effect of war

One of the many effects (and of course not the most serious) of the Second World War was a complete change in the constitution of Auto Union.

Very few post-war Germans were in a position to buy the cars produced by Audi, Horch or Wanderer (1939 W23 Cabriolet pictured). Two of those brands disappeared completely, and Audi would not return for more than 20 years.

DKW survived for the same reason it had been so successful in the past. Although its cars weren’t impressive in any non-technical sense, they were affordable, and at this point in history that was almost the only thing that mattered.

A move to the west

In October 1949, Saxony became part of the new, Communist-controlled East Germany.

Seeing what was coming, the Auto Union executives moved out a month earlier and established a new company of the same name based in Ingolstadt, where Audi still has its headquarters today.

Now focused entirely on the DKW brand, the new Auto Union quickly began producing the Schnellaster van (pictured) and the first of several sedans.

Inevitably, they all had front-wheel drive and were powered by small two-stroke engines, the technology DKW knew best.

The Sonderklasse

In 1953, Auto Union introduced the first Sonderklasse (‘special class’).

Its engine was still a two-stroke, but unlike previous ones it had three cylinders and, for the brand, an unusually large capacity of 896cc.

This led to the car being described as 3=6, a reference to the fact that it produced as many power strokes at a given speed as a six-cylinder four-stroke.

During its lifetime, the Sonderklasse was given a new body, making it longer, taller and wider than it had been before. In this form it’s sometimes referred to as the ‘wide-bodied Deek’.

The Auto Union brand

For the first time outside motorsport, Auto Union became a brand name in 1958.

Its debut model was essentially the same thing as the wide-bodied DKW Sonderklasse, except that it had a larger, 981cc version of the 3=6 engine.

This gave the car more power than its DKW equivalent, and also inspired its name: Auto Union 1000.

Sports cars

Though charming in their way, the DKW and Auto Union sedans of the 1950s were not especially attractive.

That could not be said, however, of the Auto Union 1000 Sp (pictured), a delightful sports car based on the 1000 sedan and available as either a coupe or a roadster.

The car has been referred to as a ‘baby Thunderbird’ because of its close resemblance to the first-generation Ford Thunderbird.

The 1000 Sp was preceded by the fiberglass-bodied DKW Monza coupe. Auto Union had very little to do with it, apart from supplying components.

Daimler

At around the time the 1000 sedan and Sp were going into production, Auto Union was taken over by Daimler-Benz.

By now, things were going downhill. In response to a sales collapse across Europe, the DKW motorcycle operation was transferred to the short-lived Zweirad (‘two-wheel’) Union. By the time sales improved again, Auto Union was not in a position to respond.

Meanwhile, development of the two-stroke car engines more or less stopped. An anonymous engineer angrily described this as proof that “one can kill a good principle if one allows things to be run by a sufficient number of incompetents”.

The last DKW

The final change to the three-cylinder two-stroke engine was an increase in capacity to 1175cc.

DKW’s largest production motor made its debut in 1963 under the hood of the F102, a strikingly modern-looking car with – not before time – unibody construction.

For reasons which will become apparent, this was the last car badged as a DKW, and the last produced by any Auto Union brand with a history uninterrupted by anything other than war.

It was also the only DKW developed entirely during Daimler’s ownership. Ironically, given the current rivalry between Audi and Mercedes, Audi might not exist today if there had never been an F102.

Volkswagen

Daimler’s interest in Auto Union did not last long. On January 1, 1965, the entire operation was transferred to Volkswagen.

Only three DKW models were still in production at the time – the Junior (pictured), the Munga off-roader and the previously mentioned F102.

Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen, the last surviving founder of an Auto Union brand, had died four and a half months earlier.

He was preceded by August Horch in 1951, by Johann Baptist Winklhofer in 1949 and by Richard Adolf Jaenicke way back in 1917, a decade and a half before Auto Union’s formation.

The return of Audi

Volkswagen had no time for two-stroke engines, which were now being perceived by almost everyone as unacceptably noisy and smelly, and insisted that the one in the DKW F102 should be replaced by a four-stroke.

The ideal unit was close at hand. Eventually produced in a range of sizes from 1.5 to 1.8 liters, it had been developed by Auto Union’s former owner Daimler.

The resulting F103, offered as both a sedan and a station wagon, was therefore almost entirely a Mercedes, even though it did not carry a Mercedes badge.

It didn’t carry a DKW one either. In an attempt to remove all thoughts of two-strokes from buyers’ minds, Volkswagen brought back the Audi name, which of course it now owned. The fact that modern Audis are not called DKWs is entirely due to this marketing decision.

Merger with NSU

In 1969, around halfway through the production life of the Audi F103, Volkswagen bought NSU (now sometimes referred to as ‘the fifth ring’), which had put the ingenious but initially problematic rotary-engined Ro80 on sale two years earlier.

The two acquisitions of the mid to late 1960s were merged to form an entity with the unwieldy title Audi NSU Auto Union.

Of the three brands mentioned, only Audi would survive much longer. NSU’s short-lived K70 was rebadged as a Volkswagen at the last minute, and after the Ro80 was discontinued in 1977 the brand was allowed to slip away.

The end of Auto Union

By the time Ro80 production ended, Auto Union had been completely submerged within Volkswagen. No car with that badge – or with those of DKW, Horch of Wanderer – has entered the market since.

The end can be dated precisely to January 1, 1985, when the former Audi NSU Auto Union was officially renamed Audi. In a sense, both Auto Union and NSU continued to exist, but only as subsidiaries dedicated to promoting Audi’s heritage.

It works the other way round, too. Audi can be seen today as the continuation of both the original companies and the powerful organization which brought them together in 1932. As legacies go, this one is pretty good.