What's outside today 27 - Kia Kee show car

Frankfurt am Main, 18.10.07. Outside Kia's impressive new European headquarters - in fact on a quiet piece of road at the exhibition complex that hosts the Frankfurt motor show.


A bit of a lull in the Verdict testing programme this week, but I was kept busy carwise on Thursday with the opportunity to nip over to Germany to drive Kia's Kee design study. The chance to get behind the wheel of manufacturers' show cars, prototypes or design studies is a rare privilege. Normally, car-makers are extremely nervous about letting journalists anywhere near a car that isn't the finished product, so it was interesting not only to be able to sample the Kee but also get a long chat with its designer Peter Schreyer, formerly of Audi.

The picture shows the car being loaded onto its transporter after a few days of being sampled by UK motoring journalists, a process which it survived in one piece - presumably much to the relief the people at Kia, who were about to ship it straight out to the LA motor show, where I'm sure it will appeal to the Americans.

Herr Schreyer was very generous with his time when explaining his work to us - I hope my forthcoming piece for the Indy will do this interesting story justice.

More detail on Karmann's difficulties

The online edition of Financial Times Deutschland carries more information on the problems at Karmann. Apparently, Karmann's boss, Peter Harbig, has given an interview to one of Germany's leading car mags, Auto, Motor und Sport, in which he disclosed that in the worst case, an additional 600 and 700 jobs over and above the 1800 or so that have already been reported could be at risk.

Specifically, the Rheine works will need to close in autumn 2008 when production of the A4 Cabriolet ends. At Osnabrück, the company desperately needs a follow-on contract for the Mercedes CLK convertible by July next year.

Blast from the past 8 - the DKW F102 and the first modern Audi

Two similar, smart-looking but slightly boxy German cars from the 1960s. In fact, so alike are they that you could be forgiven for thinking that they are two examples of the same model. But they aren't - quite. For all that these two cars have in common - which is a lot - they are in one respect poles apart. One was probably just about the last car to be launched with a two-stroke engine by a mainstream western manufacturer and therefore belongs firmly in the past; the other was the foundation upon which one of today's most successful prestige car brands was built.

The first car is the DKW F102, introduced in 1963. This was a modern design but its two-stroke engine held sales back (I snapped this example at Audi's museum in Ingolstadt earlier this year).


The answer was to add a powerful new four-stroke engine with an unusually high compression ratio that matched up to the rest of the car, which received a bit of a face-lift at the same time (incidentally doing away with possibly the coolest front indicators ever fitted to a car - they were set into the leading edges of the tops of the front wings). Internally, this new model, introduced in 1965, was known as the F103 but Auto Union, DKW's parent company decided it needed to make a dramatic statement to distance it from the F102, so Audi, an old badge last used before the Second World War, was reintroduced. This car is also from Audi's own collection.


At first, it was unclear whether Audi was a brand or a model name, but that soon sorted itself out. Audi has come a long way since 1965 but it owes everything to that revamped, re-engined, renamed version of the short-lived, long-forgotten DKW F102.

261 horsepower

That's 260 under the bonnet of the Alfa Spider and one standing in the field behind.

If you get the chance to drive a lot of fancy cars, you soon get used to people coming up to take a closer look or ask some questions. I particularly remember being tailed along the M6 and followed into Corley service station by some car nuts who wanted to find out all about the then newly introduced Mercedes CLS, and the toll collector at the Forth Road Bridge who instantly recognised the Audi RS4 I was driving and wanted to know all about it. But this is the first time I can remember a horse rushing over to inspect one of the Verdict's test cars.

Audi at Ingolstadt - day 2

Another day at Ingolstadt hearing about Audi's race programme. Audi has had a great deal of success with diesel-powered racing cars recently. To the extent that I'd thought about it at all, I'd just supposed that all that Audi had needed to do to be successful with this was to stuff a large enough diesel engine into one of their existing cars.

Apparently, it's not as simple as that; the V10 TDI engine is rather large and heavy, which affects the car's weight, centre of gravity and so on. That means just about everything else has to change too.

Now Peugeot has decided to do a diesel racer too, and the Audi and the Peugeot will go head to head for the first time at this year's Le Mans 24 hour race. I'm told that not much information about Peugeot's engine has got out, so it will be fascinating to see how the French company's car does against the Audi.

Why do car companies want to go racing with diesels? Well, despite the advances in recent years that mean diesel models are often more desirable than their closest petrol-driven equivalents (even disregarding the fuel consumption and possible depreciation advantages of diesels), some car buyers still think diesels are slow, noisy and smelly. Racing success will help dispel that. JCB set a new diesel world speed record not so long ago; perhaps Peugeot or Audi will be tempted to have a crack at that as well before too long. My guess would be that given that this is a comparatively neglected category of record-breaking, success could be fairly easy to come by.

Audi's sporting operation plugs into the resources of its parent and also relies heavily on IT. Some of the technology used comes from PTC, a US software house which keeps tabs on design, processes and all of the relevant documentation. An interesting if trivial by-product of this technology's use by the broader Volkswagen group is the VW Phaeton's handbook. Rather than getting a standard handbook that applies to Phaetons in general, owners get a tailored handbook that matches the precise spec of their own cars. A customer who orders a Phaeton with a sunroof gets a handbook that includes instructions on how to operate the sunroof. If no sunroof is ordered, the relevant section is omitted from the handbook. In fact this sort of attention to detail is typical of the care that has gone into making the Phaeton such a formidable machine.

Audi at Ingolstadt

An interesting afternoon at Audi. First the chance to see some of the production facilities - the final assembly stage for the Audi A3 - and then a drive in the second-generation TT.

The plant made an interesting comparison with MINI's facility in Oxford which I visited last week. It's all on a much larger scale than Oxford - Ingolstadt is Audi's main factory and also houses the company's headquarters - but there was the same sense of calm order at both facilities. Car manufacture really is a fuss-free activity these days. It has to be. Everything is magnificently choreographed, and sequencing is central to the whole thing. MINI and Audi both build to order, so it's essential that the right bits arrive on time in the right order at the line so that the cars are built to spec. Today, some apparently minor issue caused a brief pause on part of the A3 line. The man from Audi said that delays cost EUR14,000 per minute - presumably that's the value of lost production.

Car factories are full of robots these days, so in most cases, they're no longer anything to get excited up about. But I saw one particularly impressive piece of kit at Audi today - the robot that fuels the cars as they leave the line. This sounds like a simple activity, but consider the following. Cars for the domestic market get 5 litres in their tanks while those going to some other markets get 15. Those cars that are being collected from the plant by their buyers get a full tank. The robot also needs to put petrol in petrol-engined cars and diesel into diesel-engined cars. And it's not just a question of choosing petrol or diesel; the spec for the fuel has to be matched to the conditions in the countries for which the cars are destined. The robot has to get it right every time - the conseqences of getting it wrong are dire.

The new TT has already appeared on the Verdict; the car we featured was the fastest 3.2 litre version with the 4WD quattro transmission but the standard manual gearbox. The car I drove today was the same model, but fitted with the magnificant DSG gearbox - now renamed S-tronic when fitted to Audis, although other VW group brands still call it DSG. Jolly nice, too.

Finally a small bonus; there's quite a lot of fuss at Ingolstadt at the moment about the new A5. Saw one here today. Perhaps even more interesting was that the arrival of the A5 has provided an excuse to dust off some of the older Audi coupe models to pose for photographs with the newcomer - including this great example of the original Audi Coupe S from 1969.