New Auto Union
A new West German located car union was launched in Ingolstadt, Bavaria with loans from the Bavarian local government and Marshall Plan aid. The reformed company was launched three September 1949 and continued DKW's practice of making front-wheel drive cars with two-stroke engines. This included production of a small but robust 125 cc motorbike and a DKW delivery lorry, the DKW F 89 L at Ingolstadt. The Ingolstadt site was a huge one, composed of an in depth compound of previously army buildings which was OK for administration as well as auto warehousing and distribution, but at this point there had been at Ingolstadt no dedicated plant acceptable for mass production of cars: for manufacturing the corporation's first post-war mass-market passenger vehicle plant capacity in Dsseldorf was leased from Rheinmetall-Borsig. It was only a decade later on after the company had attracted a comparatively money rich investor that investment funds became available for assembling a major vehicle plant at the Ingolstadt head office site.
In 1958 Daimler-Benz took an 87% holding in the car Union company, and this was increased to an a hundred percent holding in 1959. But tiny two-stroke autos weren't the focus of the organization's interests, and while the early 1960s saw heavy investment in new Mercedes models and in a condition of the art factory for car Union's, the corporation's ageing model range at this time didn't benefit from the commercial boom of the early 1960s to the same amount as rival makers like Volkswagen and Opel. It seems the call to lose the Auto Union business was based mostly on its absence of profitability. Ironically, by the point they sold the business it also included a big new factory and near production-ready totally modern 4 stroke engine, which would enable the car Union business, under a new owner and with the advantage of a rediscovered name, Audi, to end up being one of Germany's most successful auto-makers in the 2nd half the 1960s.
In 1964 Volkswagen purchased a fifty percent holding in the business, including the new factory in Ingolstadt and the trademark rights of the car Union. Eighteen months later Volkswagen purchased absolute control of Ingolstadt, and by 1966 were using the spare capacity of the Ingolstadt plant to assemble a further sixty thousand Volkswagen Beetles per year. Two-stroke engines became less well-liked in the 1960s as consumers were more interested in the smoother four-stroke engines. In Sep 1965, the DKW F102 got an engine is four-stroke implanted, some front and back styling changes. Volkswagen dumped the DKW brand due to its associations with two-stroke technology, and having classified the model internally as the F103, sold it simply as the "Audi." Later developments of the model were named for their hp ratings and sold as the Audi 60, 75, 80, and Super 90, selling till 1972.
Audi 80 had production line in Wolfsburg as of 1973. In 1969, automobile union combined with NSU, based in Neckarsulm, near Stuttgart. In the 1950s, NSU had been the planet's biggest producer of bikes, but had continued on to produce tiny vehicles like the NSU Prinz, the TT and TTS versions of which are still popular as vintage race cars. NSU then targeted on new rotary engines based mostly on the ideas of Felix Wankel. In 1967, the new NSU Ro 80 was a futuristic auto, well before its time in technical details like aerodynamics, light weight, and safety but teething issues with the rotary engines stop the autonomy of NSU. Today the Neckarsulm plant is used to produce the bigger Audi models A6 and A8. The Neckarsulm Company is also home to the quattro GmbH; this subsidiary is answerable for development and production of the Audi hi-performance automobiles: the R8 and the "RS" model range.
The mid scale vehicle that NSU had been working on, the K70, was meant to slot between the rear-engined Prinz models and the high tech NSU Ro 80. Nevertheless Volkswagen took the K70 for its own range, spelling the end of NSU as a separate brand.
