The Audi Type P was a small two-door sedan/saloon car introduced by

Audi Audi AG () is a German automotive manufacturer of luxury vehicles headquartered in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany. A subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, Audi produces vehicles in nine production facilities worldwide. The origins of the compa ...

in 1931. It was discontinued by 1932.

History

Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen (30 July 1878 – 12 August 1964) was a Denmark, Danish engineer and industrialist. Life The son of a shipmaster who died when Rasmussen was still a young child, he attended middle school in Nakskov and in 1894 began ...

who had purchased Audiwerke AG in 1928 was concerned that the Audi

Zwickau Zwickau (; ) is the fourth-largest city of Saxony, Germany, after Leipzig, Dresden and Chemnitz, with around 88,000 inhabitants,. The West Saxon city is situated in the valley of the Zwickau Mulde (German: ''Zwickauer Mulde''; progression: ), ...

plant was badly underutilized because demand for the expensive luxury cars that Audi produced was still restricted by the economic contraction that had followed the 1929 Stock-market crashes. The other company owned by Rasmussen was Zschopauer Motorenwerke with its brand

DKW DKW (''Dampfkraftwagen'', – the same initials later also used for ''Des Knaben Wunsch'', ; ''Das Kleine Wunder'', and ''Deutsche Kinderwagen'', ) was a German car- and motorcycle-marque. DKW was one of the four companies that formed Auto U ...

, which had in 1929 introduced the small rear-wheel drive DKW Typ 4=8. Zschopauer Motorenwerke was the nation's largest producer of motor-bikes, and used a motor-bike style

two-stroke engine A two-stroke (or two-stroke cycle) engine is a type of internal combustion engine that completes a Thermodynamic power cycle, power cycle with two strokes of the piston, one up and one down, in one revolution of the crankshaft in contrast to a f ...

in their own small cars. Rasmussen became persuaded that the then noisy and lumpy two-stroke engines might be deterring customers: his short-term solution was the Audi Type P which combined the body of the DKW Typ 4=8 with a four-stroke 1,122 cc engine. Rasmussen avoided time as well as development and tooling costs for creating a new small four-stroke units from scratch by buying engines for the Type P from

Peugeot Peugeot (, , ) is a French automobile brand owned by Stellantis. The family business that preceded the current Peugeot companies was established in 1810, making it the oldest car company in the world. On 20 November 1858, Émile Peugeot applie ...

, across the Rhine in

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

. The Audi Type P therefore combined the body of a DKW 4=8 with engine of a Peugeot 201. The vehicle's four-cylinder in-line side-valve engine front mounted Peugeot engine developed a maximum output of at 3,200 rpm.

Oswald Oswald may refer to: People *Oswald (given name), including a list of people with the name * Oswald (surname), including a list of people with the name Fictional characters *Oswald the Reeve, who tells a tale in Geoffrey Chaucer's ''The Canterbu ...

, p 45 Power was delivered to the rear wheels through a three-speed manual transmission. The car had two rigid axles with transverse leaf springs. Claimed top speed was 80 km/h (50 mph). The footbrake operated on all four wheels via a hydraulic control mechanism. The Type P was available only as a two-door sedan with four windows. It was priced in 1931 at 3,385 Marks. Berlin

Rasmussen seems to have hedged his bets when deciding how to use the spare capacity of his Spandau plant. von Fersen, p. 15 At about the same time as he arranged to produce the new Peugeot-powered Audi Type P there, he also gave instructions for the development of a new front-wheel drive car to be derived from the company's innovative

DKW Typ P The DKW Typ P was the first automobile, motor car made by Dampf-Kraft-Wagen, DKW. It was a light-weight design with a monocoque, unit body made of wood#Posthumus, Posthumus, Cyril: The Story of Veteran & Vintage Cars, pp. 120, 122–123 and imitati ...

. The result was the

DKW F1 The DKW F1 was a small car mass produced by DKW (part of the Auto Union) between 1931 and 1932. It was launched at the Berlin Motor Show in February 1931. The F1 was the first of a series of front wheel drive cars, assembled at DKW's Zwickau pla ...

, developed and to be produced at Zwickau, priced at approximately 2,000 Marks, and first seen in public in February 1931 at the Berlin Motor Show. The only slightly cheaper 782/990 cc two-stroke DKW found approximately 4,000 buyers between 1931 and 1932: in the same period fewer than 400 of the four-stroke 1,122 cc Audi Type Ps were produced.

, p 43 Audi themselves gives the precise number of Audi Type Ps as 327. The Audi Type P was not directly replaced: after 1932 Audi retreated from their brief excursion into compact cars, restricting themselves for the rest of the decade to large six-cylinder engined automobiles. Meanwhile the DKW F1 and its successors, introduced to fill unused capacity in what had been the Audi Zwickau plant, proved so popular that for the rest of the 1930s Audi's own cars had to be produced at

Auto Union Auto Union AG was an amalgamation of four German automobile manufacturers, founded in 1932 and established in 1936 in Chemnitz, Saxony. It is the immediate predecessor of Audi as it is known today. As well as acting as an umbrella firm for ...

's nearby

Horch Horch () was a German car manufacturer, which traced its roots to several companies founded in the late 19th and early 20th century by August Horch. It is one of the predecessors of the present day Audi company, which itself resulted from the ...

plant.

Specifications

Sources

* Oswald, Werner: Deutsche Autos 1920-1945, Motorbuch Verlag Stuttgart, 10. Auflage (1996), * {{reflist Type P 1930s cars Cars introduced in 1931