The curious engineering of the NSU Ro 80, the pre-Audi car with a design and engine too visionary for its time

Few car enthusiasts nowadays remember the NSU brand, but it's easier to remember it as one of the four German brands that united their destinies and formed the Audi of today. Before that merger, however, NSU was often one of the brands that fascinated with visionary design and engineering solutions, so visionary that some of them were later associated rather with other brands, and it is impressive to learn today that they appeared, from actually, at NSU. The NSU Ro 80 model is one of the cars overflowing with such solutions, perhaps the most curious of all.

First of all, if we talk about the Wankel rotary piston engine today, almost all enthusiasts will say Mazda, as the first brand that comes to mind among those that have ever used this engine. More advanced enthusiasts may know that in the 70s there were several attempts by several manufacturers to experiment with Wankel engines, from Mercedes to Lada, but most of them never made it to series production. What even fewer people know is that the Wankel engine actually originated at NSU. It was invented by Felix Wankel back in the 1920s, then the patent was issued in 1934, and only in 1951 Wankel started collaborating with NSU for a series engine.

Prototypes and studies followed, and the first series car in the world with such an engine was the NSU Spider, in 1963. That engine had a single rotor, a cylinder of 996 cubic cm and produced 54 HP. And a Wankel-type engine was also found on the car we're talking about today, the NSU Ro 80, when it was publicly unveiled in 1967 at the Frankfurt Motor Show. The letters "Ro" in the name come from the rotary piston engine, and 80 is the name of the model, a name that would later be taken over by the Audi 80.

If the NSU Spider was the first production model with a Wankel engine, then the NSU Ro 80 was the first to have such a type of engine, but with two rotors, not one.

The engine was already a very innovative one in the industry, and the appearance of a "double", as it was called, seemed so mind-blowingly hi-tech that the car was presented with an 80-page press release, to help even journalists automotive and engineering to understand all the advantages of this concept. Lighter in total weight, fewer components, more efficiency from the displacement — these were just some of the essential advantages listed.

Each of the two rotors was 497.5 cubic cm, so a total of 995 cc was obtained, which was not more than the previous engine. The advantage, however, was in a much more balanced and harmonized operation of the engine. In addition, the total engine power had increased substantially, now reaching 115 HP!

Practically, a yield of 115 HP per liter had been reached in 1967! Power was transmitted to the front wheels via a 3-speed, semi-automatic gearbox, thanks to an innovative vacuum-operated clutch. The engine was only 41 cm long, 34 cm wide and 34 high, weighing only 101 kg. The entire car weighed only 1,250 kg, although it was 4.78 meters long, a size comparable to the later Audi 100.

The silhouette of NSU Ro 80 was at least as surprising and even bizarre, however, the rear part of the passenger compartment seemed to have the rear window at a more inclined angle than the windshield, creating a visual dissonance. This dissonance was accentuated by the fact that there were no parallel lines between the mounts, each having a different angle to the horizontal plane. And the rear wheels located far to the rear, just after the end of the rear door, increased the visual effect of a somewhat strange and unusual car, but this car appeared in times when manufacturers often had the courage to experiment with new shapes, so bizarre shapes appeared with a frequency bigger.

The model was received with such fascination by the press and experts that it also took the title of 1968 car of the year in Europe, the following year after the Fiat 124 had won the same title in 1967. And its silhouette was not only bizarre, but also functional , the car having an aerodynamic coefficient of 0.35. It was perceived as futuristic, from the future, packed with technologies on board, and it also inspired the people at Audi in 1971 to create the slogan "Vorpsrung durch Technik", which guided them and continues to guide them to this day.

The NSU Ro 80 was, however, too visionary or perhaps a bit too bizarre for its time and was not a major sales success.

In fact, after the merger of Audi and NSU, from 1969 both the Audi 100 and the NSU Ro 80 were manufactured in parallel at the Neckarsulm factory.

And the oil crisis of 1973 further alienated the public from extravagant engines, such as the one on the NSU Ro 80. The model was produced until April 1977, and the last car to leave the factory was number 37,374, produced throughout its career 10 years of the model.

This small number of cars produced, but also the fact that the Wankel engine ceased to exist at Audi with the retirement of this model, makes today the NSU Ro 80 one of the most interesting models for collectors, with one of the most curious histories and engineers from everything NSU and Audi ever produced.