My kind of car, the A2. I admire almost everything about it. It’s pretty much a rolling automotive manifesto for everything with which I bore my colleagues, family, friends (and, unforgivably, the Ti readership). With one fatal flaw – which we will come back to later, of course. After all, if it weren’t for that flaw, it would never have earned the backhanded compliment of featuring in this series.
Quick run through the history first. In the 1990s the Volkswagen Group was run by Dr Ferdinand Piëch, the engineer’s engineer par excellence. Piëch might be best known as the father of the fearsome Porsche 917, but his other passion was small, light and efficient – especially fuel-efficient – cars. Getting the most out of the least could be argued to be the very job of a racing car engineer, and it’s the common link between a 600bhp 917 lighting up the dark night as it howls down the Mulsanne straight, the uber-nerdy XL1 designed to travel over 100km on just one litre of fuel – and the A2.
In 1997 Audi showed a beautiful concept car called the Al2. This was two years after the seminal Audi TT concept, and Audi’s designers gave another masterclass in elegant restraint. Bauhaus-inspired is a bit of a cliché, but these two concept cars genuinely earned the descriptor. Under Head of Design Peter Schreyer, Audi’s all-star cast of designers, some of whom would go on to head their own studios, produced two beautifully simple forms, one a 2+2 coupé, the other a tallish, compact city car.
