This had to be my favorite tour of the entire trip. Immediately when we got to the factory there was a show room and a gift shop that I naturally gravitated towards. Within the show room the first car that caught my attention was one of my dream cars, an Audi RS5 Avant. Its a 4 door wagon with a twin turbo V6 producing over 600hp. To see this was an absolute dream, I could actually see myself driving one because the car was right in front of me. As we were going up to the gift shop to our right in the warehouse styled show room were 2 rs3s, one of which was their standard version and the other was one of their cars that their racing team used. I didn’t think anything could top what we had seen so far until we saw one of the best cars ever produced sitting in the parking lot. After we got done at the gift shop, I noticed from the inside that my literal all time dream car, the Lamborghini Huracan Preformante was just sitting outside in a very noticeable and beautiful light blue.
After we were done marveling at the 300 thousand dollar beast sitting in the front parking lot, we went into the waiting room before the tour began. In there was an RSQ8, an absolute beast of a V8 SUV and also an S8, the best of Audi’s sedans. We were able to sit in them, get pics, and also just marvel at the genius engineering and design of these beasts of cars before going on the tour.
The tour itself was not as engaging as BMW in my opinion. While they had similar systems and robots, the parts of production we saw were the very latest stages of production for each unit and there was honestly not much to see. The workers on the production line were harnessing parts onto the bodies of the cars and doing their final tests to make sure they’re ready for shipment to the customer. A common theme I was seeing for Audi and also for BMW was that they were all about making it as easy as possible for their workers to streamline the process as much as possible. Each worker I think was maybe spending a minute on each unit that came through which to me seems very efficient.
Even though I enjoyed the BMW tour more from a production standpoint, Audi was easily my favorite company visit of the entire trip simply because of my passion for cars. Getting the chance to see some of my favorite vehicles up close, sit inside them, and learn more about how they are produced was something I had been looking forward to long before arriving in Germany. Beyond the cars themselves, the visit reinforced something I had noticed throughout the week and that’s success of German automotive companies is built on a combination of engineering, efficiency, and attention to detail.