Audi brought a striking concept car to the 1991 Tokyo Motor Show. The Avus quattro served as the show model for the aluminum spaceframe and W12 engine, both of which reached production at a later point. The W12 was just something special going on.
The Avus quattro is named after the Avus circuit in Berlin. This circuit is now out of use and has been incorporated into the Bundesautobahn. The design of the Avus quattro is inspired by that of the Auto Union Type B from the 1930s. The short front, the elongated rear and the unpainted aluminum are a clear reference to the Auto Union racers. The curved roofline of the Avus quattro was later reflected in the Audi TT. Its appearance is therefore immediately quite unconventional and actually does not resemble the straight-line models that Audi had in the range at the time. On top of this, the gull-wing doors are an extravagant splash. The placement of the mirrors above the side window is also quite daring, a style element that we later saw on the Pagani Zonda C12, among others. In addition, the concept car’s 20-inch wheels are nearly half the height of the entire car itself. The Avus quattro did show clear similarities with the quattro Spyder, another concept car that Audi had unveiled a month earlier.
The Avus body uses only 1.5 mm thick aluminum that has been knocked by hand. As mentioned, Audi has not done a lick of paint over it, making the Avus in fact one large mirror. The use of aluminum did not stop there: after the quattro Spyder, the Avus was the second Audi concept car to be built on the Audi Space Frame, the brand’s new aluminum architecture. The interior of the Avus has a minimalist design, with a large glass roof to give the interior a spacious impression. The red leather bucket seats seem to have been plucked straight from a roller coaster, and wood has been used extensively on the center console and in the doors.
A harbinger
Wood seems somewhat out of place in a futuristic concept car that is otherwise completely constructed from aluminum. The interior of the Avus is not the only place where felled trees have been processed. The ‘W12’ that can be seen under the glass rear window is made of wood and plastic. The W12 was in fact still under development when the concept car was presented in 1991. A large air intake in the roof was to supply the fictitious power source with air. The specified theoretical specifications for the Avus do not lie: the 6.0-liter W12 should deliver 502 hp, with which the Avus weighing only 1,250 kg would have to sprint to 100 km / h in 3 seconds to stop its acceleration. at 334 km / h. Pretty impressive, especially for that time, but whether the Avus would have really been able to do it, we’ll never know.
However, that doesn’t mean that the Avus should be labeled a weird, pointless project. The Audi A8 D2 entered the market three years later in 1994 and was the first car on the market with an aluminum chassis, the aforementioned Audi Space Frame. In that car, Audi also used the W12 for the first time in 2001. So it took a while before that power source reached the production stage. The promised values ​​of the ‘power source’ in the Avus have not yet been fully realized, but with 420 hp and 550 Nm of torque, Audi has already come a long way. Incidentally, the W12 was only available in the very last year in which the A8 D2 was delivered, which makes this motorization a rarity. In 2002, the A8 D3 was already on the market, which was equipped with the twelve-cylinder from the start.
The first supercar
The W12 and the aluminum spaceframe are two aspects of the Avus quattro that found their way to the market relatively quickly. Although it was never Audi’s intention to put the Avus into production, some design elements returned to the first generation of the Audi TT in 1998.
Audi Le Mans Quattro concept
However, it took a while before Audi fully embraced the idea of ​​its own supercar. In 2003, the brand introduced the Le Mans quattro concept at the Geneva Salon, the study model that was the start of the Audi R8. It was presented to the public in September 2006, but the W12 never found its way to an Audi other than the A8. The R8 was initially available with a V8, later Audi added the V10. The Avus concept never reached the production stage one-on-one, but in retrospect, the eccentric concept car was a more important harbinger for the future of Audi than was probably suspected at the time.