[V8] allroad and not really avant garde...

[rmwoodbury at fairpoint.net]

You guys have short memories and no mercy.  All I have to do is mention an allroad and the cry goes up that I am going to buy three and keep them shuttling back and forth between my garage and my mechanic’s garage.  Nope.  Not going to happen.  Not now, not ever.  As loyal to Audi as I am, I know full well why Audi’s allroad had a relatively short model run.  Nope.

But I have a genuine passion for station wagons.  I have come full circle to the reality that a properly fitted out station wagon is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, so long as it isn’t foolishness to try to keep the thing on the road.  

The allroad is one of those wonders of German engineering. Do you wonder how it was that Audi decided to build the allroad in the first place?  This past summer my friend, the european auto journalist about whom I have written on this site before, visited us for a quick couple of lobsters and lots of a very gentle Riesling he brought from Dusseldorf just for the occasion.  He told us the history of the allroad from start to finish, and I am going to relay that priceless history to all of you who have any curiosity at all about that particular experiment in Audiphilia.

Of course it is commonly assumed that the allroad was more or less a logical development, or at least a developmental experiment that grew out of Audi’s rich rally history.  One would think particularly with an eye to the Paris-Dakar Rally, the concept of a high performance vehicle, with greater capacity than a normal sedan, coupled with high performance turbocharged engine and a suspension system that could be changed to accommodate otherwise nearly impassable terrain would be a lofty but desirable engineering and assembly goal.  This is absolutely wrong, and is in no way even remotely close to the way the allroad was conceived and developed.  Only the Parisian component is applicable.  It all happened one October during the Paris Auto Show.

Some years ago I was having an affair with a lady lawyer who worked in New York City.  She was sent to live in Paris for six months as she had the skill set to use there while one of the regular staff of the financial services company she worked for was on maternity leave. When she invited me to visit her for a couple of weeks, live with her in the apartment her company provided for her, and tour France extensively, I booked a flight.  As it happened, the trip exactly coincided with the opening of the Paris Auto Show , and that was worth the trip by itself.  (Well, the truth is her favors were worth the trip, but that’s a different kind of story.....I digress....).  

Anyway, so my European journalist friend informed us,  it was at one or another of the Paris Auto Shows that Audi sent five young engineers from Audi’s product development department.  Now the Audi product development department is actually a top secret operation located in an isolated concrete building deep in the woods of east Prussia.  The location of the facility is not marked on any maps and no road signs point to the entrance of the narrow road leading to the building. In fact, my friend tells us, the building itself is unremarkable, completely contrary to the normal, and de rigeur ultra modern glass and steel structures favored currently by most German auto manufacturers for their official buildings.  The building more closely resembles a squat WWII bunker than a modern research center.  

The five engineers sent to the Paris Auto Show that year were enormously impressed by all the models on display from manufacturers from around the world.  But of all the models from all the manufacturers on display, the engineers were most impressed with the latest version of the Citroen DS21 Pallas, with its hydro-pneumatic suspension that enabled the car, among other things, to lift itself onto its own jack in case a flat tire needed to be changed.  These engineers were among the youngest of all at Audi GMBH, and most had never actually seen one of the cars, often ubiquitously known as “The Angry Clam”.  But being true engineers, the outer skin was of little interest, much as to computer programmer, the nuances of language are of little interest today.

It was at that small café located just off the Montparnasse that the engineers came up with the idea of an Audi allroad, and despite proper motivation, for all the wrong reasons.

That night was the last for them in Paris, and they were spending it  in the spirit of good camaraderie.   Usually that would mean a heavy meal of wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut washed down with copious amounts of good, dark German beer.  But there off the Montparnasse, good German food was in short supply, so after five courses of modern French cuisine, the engineers started throwing back what the French call Un Panzerfaust, which is a double shot of schnapps, shaken with one third measure of condensed milk and topped with a triple shot of Pernod.  

Now the original Panzerfaust was the German equivalent to the bazooka, and in its later versions would blow the treads off any tank ever built.  After the second  of those Un Panzerfaust as served on any of the banks of the Seine in Paris, it was pretty hard for those young engineers to keep their shoes on.  It was there, then, that the idea of building the allroad came clearly into view.  “If the French can do it with that ‘clam’”, they said. “Certainly a proper German Avant can do it from Paris to Dakar.”  

The rest is history.  The Audi allroad was built using an A6 body with wheel well cladding theory stolen from Chevrolet pickup trucks, and it was entered successfully in the Paris Dakar Rally.  It was then decided to market the car, particularly to the US where it was commonly known that anyone would buy anything from Germany, even without first drinking anything laced with Pernod.  

And of course, there is true  that few have ever seen a Citroen DS21 runnning regularly more than thirty miles from Paris, nor have many people seen many of them being driven aside from carrying around high ranking French government employees.  The allroad did much better.  It made it to the US, and lasted until the first set of suspension components gave out, then it was time to retire the whole concept.  

It is not true that the allroad lasted in the marketplace only slightly longer than the hangovers of those five young engineers. 

At that is the whole story.  

Roger