Audi Is Ready to Celebrate Five Decades of “Vorsprung durch Technik” Next Year

The latest “Anniversary Dates 2021” digital booklet has been embedded below in PDF form in case you also want to keep up to date with Audi’s important dates and model history. It’s a 30-page long catalog, so there’s reason to bring up front a few highlights.

For example, the compact A3 series is going to celebrate a quarter of a century of existence in 2021, while the Audi Cabriolet, the S4, and Audi 80 are celebrating three decades. Not all milestones are positive, though, because next year Audi will also mark 55 years since the production of the last DKW passenger car, or 70 years since August Horch passed away.

Everything is neatly arranged in chronological order (including exciting motorsport celebrations) so we can go as far down in history to the moment when the first Horch automobile was created, some 120 years ago. But, instead, we’re going to focus on the renowned “Vorsprung durch Technik” catchphrase.

Audi’s core message, which could stand for “progress through technology” or “the technical edge,” according to the German company’s own English interpretation, was originally showcased in a commercial some 50 years ago.

It was August 1969 when Auto Union GmbH and NSU Motorenwerke AG joined forces to create Audi NSU Auto Union AG. With the model range of the new conglomerate being extremely diverse and deeply technical, Hans Bauer, from the Audi NSU advertising department, came up in 1971 with the idea of communicating this via a corporate message.

The result – the iconic “Vorsprung durch Technik” slogan – was first used in an Audi-NSU commercial back in January of 1971. The phrase then gained enough traction to be used extensively in connection with Audi from 1982, and even in international advertising (including the U.S. or the UK) it was often used directly in German, without an English translation.