50 at 50: Audi celebrates five decades of making small cars

There's a part of the Audi iceberg that we've never seen in the United States. It's where cars like the A1, which is now in its second generation, and the A2 are found. The car that started this lineage is a small, two-door hatchback called 50 that turns 50 years old in 2024.

Rewind to 1961: NSU released a two-door, 135-inch-long city car called Prinz 4 that was powered by an air-cooled, rear-mounted two-cylinder engine. Two years later, the German brand unveiled a longer, more powerful, and overall more usable evolution of the car called Prinz 1000 that gained a four-cylinder engine.

NSU wasn't working alone — far from it. Volkswagen purchased the troubled brand in 1969, merged it with Auto Union , and created the modern-day Audi brand. Ludwig Kraus, a former Daimler-Benz engineer who worked as Audi's technical director, spearheaded the city car project. The end result was a 137-inch-long two-door hatchback with an angular-looking exterior design penned by Hartmut Warkuß, who became Volkswagen's head of design in 1993, and a surprisingly spacious interior.

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