Audi 100 C2 5S

Posted by Richard Tatham / 7:12 PM / Comments: (0)
The story of modern Audis is a curious one. After WWII, no car wore the Audi badge until 1965 when Volkswagen resurrected it for a "new" mid-size saloon. This new model had been acquired during Volkswagen's buyout of a company called Auto Union, a name that harks back to an agglomeration of long-deceased German brands of which one was, of course Audi. Those four marques are represented by the magician's rings that grace the nose of every modern Audi today, and also represent Horch, Wanderer and DKW, and Daimler-Benz were glad to be rid of them when it sold them to VW in 1964.

This new model (known as the F103) became the template for all modern Audi's, as well as those Volkswagens that share the same platform. But the old brand name, Auto Union DKW, bore with it strong connotations of smoky, rattly two-strokes weaving their way through post-war rubble, and it was a reputation Volkswagen didn't want anything to do with. By reviving the Audi name, they hoped to add a touch of class to the production, and the DKW F103 was renamed the Audi 72 (signifying its power output.) 60, 80 and 90 soon followed, as variants of the same model, but Volkswagen had declared that no other Audis were to be built. Audi was to be a brand under VW, not a marque of its own.

But VW weren't aware of the beast that lay within. When they bought Auto Union, they also bought the factory, and with that the engineers who worked inside, who were not happy with this decision. Unbeknownst to the VW overlords, they built an entire working prototype of a big-engined large saloon, ready for production, and presented it to the management in 1968.

This rebellion proved phenomenal. That original Audi 100, designated C1, went on to become Audi's greatest-selling vehicle in its history, and the Audi name was cemented in the minds of Seventies buyers as a worthy consumer brand.

For the 1976 upgrade, Audi needed something more. The 100 name no longer referred to the engine output, and a hundred horses just wouldn't cut it in the world of executive saloons. Volkswagen, still reluctant to show any sign of their own originality, went on the prowl for a new power-source and found it lurking under the bonnet of a Mercedes; unsurprising when you remember from whom VW had bought Auto Union in the first place. What they saw, growling away in the engine bay, was the OM617, special in that it had not four, or six, or even eight cylinders, but five. An inline 5-cylinder engine unlike anything else on the market, delivering power to saloons such as the Mercedes W114 and its 1976 replacement, Mercedes W123. And coming from a luxury manufacturer, it had excellent qualities; it was smooth, it was powerful, it was eminently reliable. There was only one problem. It was a diesel.

VW soon fixed that, and by the time of its launch, the Audi 100 C2 was charging along on all five cylinders, making it the first inline-five petrol engine in the world. And the number of cylinders wasn't the only big number it carried; 134horses of power, and a price tag to match, quickly put the Audi 100 in the top class of executive saloons. The wonderful metallic model here, the 5S, was the top level of that top level, and commanded a purchase price of 24,000 DM in 1979, or $113,000 in today's money.

The price quickly set Audi apart from its Volkswagen stablemates; despite a similar design, the C platform was the next step up from the B on which the Volkswagen Passat was based, although Audi still saw room for extension. A top-of-the-line, high-class model was launched in 1980 with two bigger numbers; a showroom price of 30,000 DM and the name Audi 200.

With these two weapons, the Audi fleet was perfectly poised to capture a significant part of the market. That phenomenal engine gave it equal chances against the sporty BMW 5-series, whilst offering a level of refinement comparable to Mercedes' E-Class and unsurprisingly, the Audi 100 racked up heavy sales all the way into the Eighties. The turbo-charged 200 series even gave the S-Class and 7-series BMW E23 a serious run for their money both in the luxo-barge market and on the autobahns in general.

With 900,000 produced, it's incredible to believe that the only example one can find is at a classic car gathering in downtown Warsaw. Polished to gleaming, this Ingolstadt icon is one of only a handful of Typ 43 Audi 100s still cruising around. The generation had to surrender to Audi's Vorsprung durch Technik philosophy, or Advancement Through Technology, and as the C2 gave way to the C3 in 1982, the old 100 found itself crumbling away in car parks.

The reputation of the old Audi is a now a grandfatherly one; very much flat caps and pipes and slow Sunday afternoon cruises. And yet we shouldn't forget the significance of the Audi 100; there may have been only four rings on the grill, but there was a fifth one under the bonnet.




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Citroen Visa 17RD/ C15

Posted by Richard Tatham / 3:25 PM / Comments: (0)

You stop mid-stride, feet slamming down on the pavement. Your hand is buried in one pocket, rummaging around in the way your school teachers told you not to. Not there. Other hand, other pocket. Panicking, you try your back pockets, heart-rate beating faster as you realise these are the trousers without back pockets. You breathe in.

Don't worry, it'll be in the jacket pocket. Left side, nope, right side, come on, come on, it's got to be here somewhere. Tension mounts. You check your trousers again. You're patting yourself over like a bad mime or a cheap date. You remember picking it up, don't you. Don't you? And just as your chest tightens and you're about to utter a particularly vehement profanity, you feel it. Inside jacket pocket. You mutter a thank you to the sky, shake your head, and walk on.

It seems that the smaller the object, the more important it is, which certainly applies to house keys and mobile phones. And one need only look at the two-dimensional bank card you slipped into your pocket to understand the name of this car. All angles, large quantities of plastic and a feeling you could lose it down the back of the sofa, it's the Citroen Visa.

Poor Citroen. There was a time when they represented all that was good about French motoring. A sense of innovation that was eccentric without being incomprehensible, a sense of accessible flair, and a smattering of deliriousness. Any writer who says "a certain je ne sais quoi" deserves to be shot, as with Citroen you know exactly what it was. It was madness.

Unfortunately in the Seventies, madness didn't get cars sold, and the company found itself being bought out by Peugeot, who came to the sensible, albeit dull, conclusion that Citroen really out to start making cars instead of fantasies for a bit. They tried to push Citroen's management into doing so, and I'd like to imagine Peugeot's management walking into the boardroom at this proposal to be met with scoffs, blank looks and at least one heart attack, interrupted by an engineer running in screaming "Mon Dieu, I 'ave eet! Let's build a car shaped like a doughnut, and powered by sardines!"

This silliness couldn't be allowed to continue, and the Peugeot management kindly yet firmly led the Citroen team into some padded cells to calm down while they looked at what was available. At the time of the takeover, one of the only feasible projects Citroen had on paper was called Prototype Y, a draft of a supermini based on the Fiat 127. Considering Fiat had sold their 49% in Citroen a few years before, and had failed to answer its phone calls ever since, Peugeot shelved that project in favour of their own slightly more sober Project VD. Rather than being a plan to embarrass Citroen with some questionable diseases, Project Voiture Diminuee was a similar supermini based on Peugeot's successful 104, which had been released in 1972, prior to the takeover.

Project VD, like all concepts, took a number of years from concept to production, and in the meantime Peugeot hurriedly launched a 104 clone called the Citroen LN. This was a stop-gap car to get the ageing withered Citroen Ami out of the dealerships, and the customers in, but due to the swift conclusion of Project VD in 1978, Citroen found itself with two superminis on its hands; the now-upgraded LNA , and the new Citroen Visa. Add to that the parent 104, and PSA (as the combined Peugeot Citroen entity is known) had three exceedingly similar cars in their stable.

Line them up side by side and Citroen's real influence on the Visa is undeniable. Unlike the knock-off LNA, the Visa had some of that oddness quintessential to the brand, and this was visible from the porcine plastic snout to the coquettish lift of the rear wheel arch. Sitting inside was an equally warped experience. The dash gauges looked like two cheap travel clocks glued to the steering column, and where the indicator and headlight stalks should protrude was instead something called a "satellite"; a coffee-cup shaped device that housed all the switches and stalks needed to control the ancillaries for Rain, Road and Night, or PRN as the French acronym went. With one twist, you got washers, wipers, headlights, indicators and horn, showing the fantastic amount of thought Citroen put into their designs. They cared so much about your driving experience, they even tried to make turning on the headlights interesting.

For the 1982 facelift, the outside was dulled somewhat but to compensate, an enormous range of engines was opened up. The Visa was already available with thrifty 650, 1100 and 1300cc engines, but a 1.6 GTI version was now also up for grabs. Called the Chronos, it snorted out 135hp and was capable of pushing terrifying 192km/h on those little 3-bolt wheels. Our prettily chrome-nosed edition is something far more practical, being as it is the diesel edition, and not just that but the RD which featured pretty much every optional extra you could get on a Visa, including a rear wiper.
Like any sane man, I'm not normally excited over diesels, and the general public weren't either. A tiny tiny hatchback with five doors and a diesel engine? What on earth? You must be some sort of Romanian goatherd, desperate to get his wife, kids and flock to the market on less than a litre of fuel to demand that sort of frugality.

How contrived. How impolitic. How financially sound. Citroen (with Peugeot breathing down its neck) jumped on the chance and set up Oltcit, a Romanian brand producing cheap versions of the little Visa for the local market. But how to make the Visa even cheaper, for the Eastern Europeans? Papers were shuffled, accountants were called in, and Prototype Y was resurrected from the discard pile. Still bearing its prototype design, the Oltcit was stuffed full of unwanted parts from other manufacturers, branded, and sold to the poorest of Ceausesu's citizens.

And yet the whimsy of Citroen just couldn't let go. Knowing that they had unleashed a possibly normal (if low-quality) car on the world couldn't be forgiven, and within two years the Oltcit had two chevrons stuck on its nose, and was brought to the West as the Citroen Axel. If they couldn't make the car mad, Citroen figured, they'd make the business side of things insane.

Therefore, in 1984, the PSA group found itself selling four superminis under two brands based on three designs using two families of parts, with the end result that all four cars looked really very similar. And even worse, PSA bought out Chrysler, released a Talbot supermini called the Samba, again based on the 104. This was madness to the extreme, and the Citroen management must have been cackling in Gallic glee.

The only success that can possibly be attributed to this sprawling family was the van derivative. Considering the myriad names on offer, something had to be done to bring the unruly clan to order and, when launched, the van was called simply C15. Launched only a year after our diesel Visa, with the same "lively 1769cc engine" as the sales talk goes, the C15 went on to phenomenal van success, having a twenty-year production run of nearly 1.2million units in all. All of the outre interior was gone, the rear wiper abandoned and even the chrome trim discarded, but the plastic wheel arches that belie true dieselness were kept; one of the few style touches our Viva and C15 share.

Added up, there were nearly twice as many derivatives produced than there were genuine Peugeot 104s, yet of those the most populous was the Citroen Visa. For such a quirky little car, very few of them remain, so to see such a top-flight model (albeit a diesel) maintained with such care shows what Citroen really gave us. The smallest things really are the most important.

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VAZ 2104 / Lada Riva Estate

Posted by Richard Tatham / 3:16 PM / Comments: (0)
Using numbers as names is a precarious business. It's very hard to get enthusiastic over a 530i or an i30 if there's no name to tell you whether it's cute or manly, firm or fragile. The Nokia N97 doesn't sound anywhere near as good as the HTC Hero, regardless of quality, and very few people would buy a perfume whose name was also its barcode. Audiophiles can only rattle on for hours over the merits of any particular piece of hi-fi equipment because their passion for that object is strong enough to see past the obtuse sequences of digits to the beauty underneath. More casual consumers and appreciators need something more accessible, more tangible, a Proper Name to cling to when we regard an object, especially something we intend to buy. People who enthuse too freely about the 68020 and its superiority over the 68000 rapidly find themselves isolated at parties because of their incomprehensible jargon. And also because they generally smell of onions and sweat, but that's another matter.

Of course, in the automotive world there are some manufacturers, especially at the top end, who still insist on digital identification. The product catalogues of BMW, Mercedes and Volvo are spattered with numbers, and the only clue the uninformed reader has to their interpretation is that bigger is usually better. At the lower end, where the quality of the product isn't quite so evident, an impersonal sequence of digits doesn't do much to drive sales. Fiat and Renault managed to work that one out before it was too late, unlike Rover, and even Alfa-Romeo has the decency to give their prettier cars equally pretty names. That's not to say that all names are appropriate (the Mitsubishi Charisma is anything but), but at least when you discuss models with a salesman, the only number that really matters is the price.

Another important number that should never be revealed is a lady's age. When that number reaches a certain value in Poland, it becomes unimportant and her birthday alternates to a "back-up" birthday called a Name Day. Since most Poles are named after saints in the Catholic faith, every calendar date is the feast of at least one of these religious characters, and thus the lady can be treated to flowers and cake on a particular day of the year without having to reveal her vintage.

Such frippery as names and saints was wasted on the Communist authorities, who tried to stamp out such pointlessness by forcing the church underground and giving things only practical, logical identifiers. Thus we have a BA3-2104 staring at us in the parking lot; some devil's code of Cyrillic and numeric that leaves foreigners confused until, BAM, the flash of realisation. "It's a Lada!" comes the cry. Usually followed by mocking laughter.

BA3, or AutoVAZ as it's written in English, is the manufacturer specifically established by the Soviet Authorities to build copies of the Fiat 124. From its 1966 inception, the snappy Fiat was winning design awards for its sensible, utilitarian design, and the Soviets needed a new car to replace their ageing and decrepit Moskvitch 408. So, calls were made, deals were signed, and in 1970 the first Ladas, known as VAZ-2101, rolled out of a factory the other side of the Volga river.

Although VAZ was established purely to sell the 2101, the company was granted the name "Zhiguli"after a Russian mountain range, with the aim of making the car seem more Soviet and less Italian. But like all numbers, 2101 never really caught on in the local parlance, and the 2101 quickly earned the moniker "Kopek". The estate version, 2102, was called the "Deuce", while the bigger 2103 was called the "Trio".

But don't let the numbers confuse you. The Lada was more than just a clone of the Italian design; all in, the Russians added over 800 "upgrades" to the design, to help it survive in the harsh Soviet climes. Aside from monstrously strong suspension upgrades and radical engine re-designs (chain-driven valves instead of pushrods, if you know what that means), the entire body shell was made of thicker grade steel to help it survive the rough roads. Things that a Westerner would laugh at, like a crank handle to start the engine if needed, quickly become touches of genius when you consider how you yourself would feel in the middle of Siberia, in -40 degrees, with a flat battery. Combine that with a comfortable, if somewhat spartan, cabin, and the 2101 earned itself a fairly decent reputation, and the decision was made to export the car overseas.

Fast forward to 1980, and even the Russians realise that the Lada style is beginning to look a bit, well, old-fashioned. Trapped between the need to repay the foreign loans, and the wisdom of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," VAZ implemented a facelift of the range. The 2103 had already become the 2106, with a new range of engines, headlights and grilles, and these upgrades were passed down to the lower models respectively. The 2101 became the 2105 and, confusingly, the 2102 became the 2104. At this point, some bright spark at VAZ realised that there was no way on earth the poor Western mind was going to get to grips with all these numbers, and the entire range was exported under the name "Lada Riva", the brand we all know and laugh at today.

The 2104, or Riva Estate, is rendered in Russian as "Четвёрки" and translates as "Quartet", a charmingly musical name for a car shaped
like a cheap piano. Released in 1984 (making it the most "modern" of the Riva stable), it was quickly put to use as the most capable of luggage-haulers. This one still bears the faded and worn stickers of a Warsaw taxi, a sign that it has worked a hard life and a probable explanation for its curiously lopsided stance in the car park. Yet its presence in Warsaw car park at all is even more curious, when you look at the deeper history of the car.

Skim through any chronicle of the Riva's origin, and the same car will keep coming back; the Fiat 124. Read the next line, and another car is mentioned; the Fiat 125. At first glance, these two Fiats are identical, but the trained eye sees the three extra inches the higher-numbered car boasts in length. What you don't see is the raft of other mechanical differences in engines, brakes and suspension that mark out the 124 and 125 as fundamentally different cars. Yet without the 124, the 125 would never have existed, because it is itself a development, and from that again comes the Polski Fiat 125p, equal progeny of the 124 and a cousin of the Lada Riva. Or first cousin once removed, if you like.

Even without the family ties, the number of Lada Rivas in the world is staggering. Russian Ladas alone have topped over 13.5million, and although the '5 is due to be phased out, the '7, or luxury edition, is still going strong. Add to that all the clones still being constructed in places like Ukraine and Egypt, plus the original run of Fiat 124s that inspired them all, and the number goes well above 15million, making it one of the most produced cars of all time. This places the Riva in the realms of the Volkswagen Beetle and the Ford T as true People's Cars.

From a Western perspective, today's Lada Riva is laughable, being as it is a Sixties design carried on into the 21st century with very little changed. And yet its continued production (yes, they're still being made) highlights the purely practical nature of the car. They aren't even equipped with an odometer these days, partially because of the added expense, but also because it doesn't really matter. These cars are maintained from so many scavenged parts from older vehicles that the mileage of any given vehicle could never really be proved. And with so many produced, even the older models can be made to look younger than they are, if needed.

One should never mention her age, but the lady Lada just turned 40, and for all the jibes made about the Riva, it wouldn't hurt to break with Communist tradition and celebrate a number, just this once.

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BMW E31 8-series

Posted by Richard Tatham / 3:29 PM / Comments: (0)
Under Communism, money was scarce. Not necessarily because Communism is a poor model of economy, but set right down in Marx and Engel's manifesto is the idea of a brutally heavy tax to equalise all workers; anyone who earns anything above the status quo gets taxed back into submission. The concept was that the wealth of an economy was judged not on raw cash, but on goods, a "production unit", as it were, whose effective translation means it's not how much you have, but what stuff you've got. In the West, we had another name for that way of thinking. It was called the Nineteen-Eighties.

Still, it's generally acknowledged that the Communist approach to stuff-acquisition was flawed, and this heavily-taxed population could do little more than barter with each other for the meagre goods that were in circulation. If you had money, you bought every non-rationed item in the local shop as soon as it was delivered, and spent the next week trading your new stash of toilet paper with the man who bought all the soap the previous week, or exchanged a few rolls with the man who had all the light bulbs from a month back.

The excess money that Poland's pitiful private sector earned was sucked into the vacuum called ZUS; Poland's department for all matters of Social Insurance. Established to redistribute wealth to the needy, it quickly grew into a bloated and corrupt organisation with a habit for transferring money straight into the pockets of its employees; a tradition us in Warsaw saw maintained last year, as the president of ZUS was arrested on six charges of corruption.

Of course, back in the days of Communism when nobody had anything, any luxury at all was conspicuous. Any display of wealth was treated not just with a jealous sneer, but with an outright contempt; no-one could amass anything of substantial worth without having some sort of inside connections to the establishment, and therefore shiny Western cars went hand in hand with state-level corruption. It's little wonder, then, that such a flagrant show of largesse should be parked outside my local ZUS office.

The BMW E31 (yes, the next model after the E30), was nothing less than a supercar. Penned as a replacement for the ageing 6-series coupe, the E24 (two-door sister of the E23), it was a wholly new development aimed at an entirely new market called the 8-series, supplanting the 7-series as the most luxurious BMW available.

It might only be one number higher, but the 8-series was leagues ahead of anything else the German manufacturer had made before or, some argue, since. With nothing smaller than a V8 in the nose, and the majority weilding V12 5-litre engines, this super-cruiser tipped the scales at nearly two tonnes of sculpted angles, computer-designed to squeeze the prodigious bulk through the air stream. It was a veritable orgy of technology, involving hydraulic rear steering mechanisms (yes, four wheel steering on the top models), full fly-by-wire control and an integrated network to operate the most basic of accessories. Even the electric rear windows had two motors each, which automatically raised the glass once the car passed 100mph. With this level of equipment, the E31 wasn't just sporting, it was a level of sumptuousness unrivalled in its field. The nearest competitor, the Mercedes SL, didn't even come close.

The target market of this unparalleled piece of machinery was the top-notch banking class; the extreme end of the pay scale who could afford to drive such a ridiculously over-powered piece of machinery. BMW alone spent over 1.5bn Marks ($1bn in today's money) bringing the E31 into existence, and expected buyers to pay accordingly. In a country like Poland, where the free market was stifled by Marxian taxes, the only people with that kind of money were those with government ties.

Yet, if the Entwicklung (evolution) number of the 1989 E31 comes right after the 1982 E30, what happened in the intervening years? Why did clients have to wait most of the decade to take collection of this ultimate machine?

To answer this, we have to step back even further in time to an unpronounceably-named man called Paul Bracq who became head of BMW's design department in 1970 and two years later unveiled one of the most jaw-dropping shapes in motoring history; the BMW Turbo. This concept, of which only two were ever made, is considered so influential that it was still winning design awards twenty-two years later. It really is a ravishing piece of work, and if you haven't used your search engine of choice to find a picture of it, do so now. Designated E25, the BMW Turbo bloodline is directly visible in the E31 as well as in another incredible concept, the M8; a motorsport-tuned version of the 8-series capable of delivering a pant-wetting 550hp. Its existence was denied by its constructors for nearly twenty years until, in 2008, BMW confessed that they had indeed built every teenager's wet dream, they'd just been keeping it to themselves because they didn't think they'd ever be able to sell it.

This seems a rather peculiar way of thinking, as even the intense level of computer-aided design that went into the M8, and the E31, hasn't been able to mask Paul Bracq's exquisite flair for design. And yet sales of the E31 through the Nineties were never as high as BMW had hoped. Although 5000 orders were placed as soon as the car was displayed at a 1989 motor show, little more than 32,000 were ever sold during the entire production run, and although most 8-series were sold with the more powerful V12 engine rather than the V8, BMW knew that they'd hit some sort of limit on the level of automotive outrageousness people would pay for, and that to add a ludicrously powerful Sport Edition (M8) on top would be madness.

Sitting on mis-matched alloys with the doorhandles pulled off and the headlights ripped out, this supercar is in a very sorry state, and it's little wonder why. Even basic maintenance items like suspension and brakes can empty your savings account, and should the car need any of its electrical niggles sorting out, any owner has to be prepared to dig deep. Even driving one around can drain your wallet faster than any government bureau, believe it or not, and that's without the expense of repairing the Nikasil issues that plagued earlier cars; low-quality fuel in the States and the UK burned their way through engine linings, costing BMW thousands in insurance claims and recalls.

The 8-series found itself at the top of a very lonely market; far too heavy and large to be treated as a sports car, but far too expensive to maintain as a daytime cruiser. While its sublime smoothness and handling made it great for those motorway miles, as soon as it entered town roads the fuel gauge would plummet; consumption figures over 25litres per 100km (that's 11 mpg, or 9.5 for the Yanks), and all that delicious surging power went to waste in a cloud of burnt exhaust gas. And in Poland, where motorways still aren't really in existence, there's little point in owning a car that capable of devouring them. Add to that the level that this particular unit has degraded to, and you'd find yourself needing a government-sized welfare package to maintain, let alone restore it. Which might not be a problem for the owner; maybe he knows someone on the inside...





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