This day took us to the Audi factory and museum, which was absolutely one of the biggest highlights of the trip. We got up early and went on a long bus ride to Ingolstadt, where the audi factory and museum are. Conner and I were looking forward to this day for a while before we left to Germany. We were first allowed to go explore the museum before our factory tour, which was insanely cool. I tried to take pictures of every single exhibit on the top floor, which was all classic cars and bikes from Audi’s early history. All the cars here were insanely beautiful, or insanely weird, or both. Theres a car with a sink built in that was built for the Finnish Royal Family to go on hunting trips in. There’s a motorcycle with tank treads that was originally built for the nazis and later commissioned by the US Army as well (one thing I found interesting is that for the works that were commissioned by the government from 1939-1945 were always described as “for the govt” or “for the military”, for obvious reasons).

There were a million cool vehicles, and I’d love to go over all of them, but it would take too long. My favorite by far though was this car, the Audi 225 Front Roadster, which looks like a car The Penguin would drive. It was the peak of luxury vehicles in the 1930s, and only 2 were originally produced.

Its an insanely cool car. The curved bodywork, the massive front, the red upholstered interior, and the beautiful cream color all make this feel like the type of car a king should drive. I took a ton of other photos of the museum, definitely too many. There was a whole floor dedicated to the audi R8, which is their flagship sportscar, one of which was a sky blue “le mans” edition which was insanely cool. There was also one from the first iron man movie with an iron man suit next to it which was neat. I spent so much time ogling the cars in the museum, I had to run to catch up with our group before the tour started. the tour itself was cool, mostly just because of how large that plant is. It’s the size of a medium sized town, and all of it is dedicated to Audi. Seeing the cars assembled on the assembly line one after the other was super cool-we saw the gigantic robotic arm that puts the dashboard console into each car, which was not only gigantic, but incredibly precise and fast as well. Cool to witness if you’re the type of person that thinks how its made is an interesting show, which I am from time to time. After the tour, we listened to a presentation by a guest speaker for audi, which was fascinating. He told us that Audi plans on stopping all future development on gas-powered cars in 2026, which was shocking to me. I’ve always associated audi with engines, so the thought of them completely stopping that side of their business was more than surprising. The reasoning makes sense, however, as EU regulations plan on phasing out all gas cars by 2030.  Other takeaways that were interesting were insights into the business models for Bentley and Lamborghini, which are both owned by audi-it was interesting to see how a product is marketed when it’s exclusively for the super-rich. Lunch was at the audi museum food court, which was turkey schnitzel with fries and chocolate cake, all of which were amazing. After lunch, I went and checked out the audi clothing store and got myself a white audi sport jacket (only 50 euros!!!), as well as some gifts for my dad- a t shirt and a toy quattro. I also went back and took some more photos in the museum, and saw the massive vertical car lazy susan they have that has 16 supercars on it. I like cars if you cant tell. The whole trip was awesome, and that night, we had a lot of time to ourselves and conner and I went to Masters of Kebab which was great, with huge portions.