Pub quiz whiz, car fan or just a general know-it-all? You might get a kick out of our Quick Car Pub Facts series.
This time we’ve got a rapid-fire run down of some of the wackiest facts about Audi to either amaze or annoy your mates down the boozer with.
Audi’s name means “hear”
Audi’s founder, German engineer August Horch, started his first car company in 1899, but after coming to blows with his CFO, he left and started a rival company: August Horch Automobilwerke GmbH.
Unfortunately, he realised that the Horch name, which in German means ‘hear’, legally belonged to his former company, and so to avoid copyright infringement he renamed the company per the Latin translation of his surname - audi. It’s the same word from which we get ‘audio’.
Audi pioneered the dual-clutch gearbox
These days, many high-performance cars, including most from Audi, come with quick-shifting dual-clutch automatic gearboxes, but long before that it was one of Audi’s rally cars which first sported a dual-clutch.
The car was the famous Quattro S1 E2, which was given a prototype Porsche-engineered gearbox to make the most of its vicious 600bhp power output. Nowadays, dual-clutches are available on everything from the Audi R8 to the Renault Twingo.
Only Audi’s best employees get to build the R8
Speaking of the R8, only Audi’s longest-serving and best-performing employees get to build the supercar, which is put together at the Neckarsulm facility, headquarters of quattro GmbH.
Much like Nissan’s team of master-builders who work on the GT-R, Audi’s supercar supremos are the best of the best and are nicknamed “silverliners” within the company, as most of them have been with Audi for decades and now sport grey hair.
It was the first company to crash test its cars
Say the words “automotive safety” and the first thing that’ll spring to most peoples’ minds is Volvo, but it’s actually Audi which lays claim to being the first manufacturer to crash test its cars.
In fairness, they weren’t the sophisticated crash tests you see nowadays with slow-mo cameras, sensors and dummies. Instead, Audi’s engineers simply rolled their cars down a hill in front of a group of spectators to demonstrate safety.
Audi built a driverless car to tackle the famous Pikes Peak hillclimb
Audi has a long history with the Pikes Peak hillclimb, setting consecutive speed records in the 1980s with the likes of Michele Mouton and Walter Rohrl behind the wheel of its all-conquering Quattros.
But in 2010, a driverless Audi TTS - developed by Standford University and named Shelly in honour of Mouton - completed the hillclimb with no human assistance. Sure, it was about 19 minutes slower than Sebastien Loeb’s all-time record, but that’s not half bad for a robot.
