On Fri, 28 May 2004, Ryan Mark Shankland wrote:

> I caught this thread late, so if this is covered ground delete on, but isn't
> the audi supposed to handle the sport car manifestations of vw, and one of
> the criticisms of vw of late is that the lower end audi lines are competing
> with vws? If vw offers a sport car, they'll be competing with themselves in
> another venue, unless they can reestablish that audi is the luxury brand.

Audis are luxury cars sold on a professional racing/rally heritage, so
while some of them (like the S4) are sports cars, the rest are mostly just
luxury (with a bit of go behind them, typically.)

VW's sports cars have never really competed with Audi on any front.  The
Karmann-Ghia AFAIK came out before VW bought Audi, and was just a rebodied
Beetle, again so far as I know.  The Scirocco (especially the 16v) was a
very zippy little economy-sports car, like a Honda CRX.  The later Corrado
was a faster, heavier, less economy-minded execution of a sports coupe.

Audi's "real" sports cars have been turbo and quattro since quattro came
out, and there's definitely been no overlap there until recently.  For
example, the Golf G60 Rallye was supercharged instead of turbo, and syncro
instead of quattro.  The rest of the recent story (4Motion, quattro, and
the Audi TT) is more complicated than it is interesting. :)

ian Butler / ian@bluemoon.hplx.net
'88 Audi 5000S quattro
'88 VW Scirocco 16v
'77 Mercury Marquis (for sale)