A2 designer's opinion on what went wrong

S

sailesh

A2OC Donor
Saw the attached article in CAR magazine recently and thought you would all be interested. It's an interview with the designer of the Audi A2 (Stefan Sielaff) who is now with Bentley, in his opinion (see box section) the A2 was too complicated for most people to understand..

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too complicated??? One of its strengths is its simplicity.

Unlock the car key in ignition start and drive off??

What part of the A2 is more complex than any other car? The front service flap is simplicity itself.

It was overpriced due to the build process in Aluminium. People simply won't pay for things they cannot see. So tell them it is all aluminium and they will say "ok but that is not worth the extra cost". If the weight makes it more economical then how far would you have top drive to save 3 to 4 thousand pounds!!!

As for telling people that they won't rust (the cars not the people) many buyers change their cars every few years and so they never get chance to rust anyway? They are more concerned about the resale value and if they are expensive to buy then they are expensive to buy secondhand.

So to me it was all down to cost / price, complexity doesn't really seem to be a factor.

Steve B
 
Agree with above. They were also very futuristic looking when they first came out which may have put people off too.
 
i remember back in the day when i hated the look of the A2 due to the ever so popular TT....how things have changed :/ maybe its age related lol

maybe my thinking back then that i was hoping for a smaller version of the TT and that the A2 was born. either way they are both great looking cars and continue to stand the test of time...a timeless classic :)

cammy
 
I understood the man who is generally credited with being responsible for the A2 design to be Luc Donckerwolke? although I note the bloke in the article above is merely claiming to be "leader of the design team". Actually, Wikipedia says Sielaff was (for a very brief period of time) head of the interior design team at Audi, so surely would have had ****** all to do with the actual design of the body/mechanics of the car? Maybe that's why he obviously doesn't like A2 - it was success story, but not his.
 
The A2 wasn't a success for Audi, and Sielaff was in charge of the design team as I understand it. He's commented before on the actual design - how the new aluminium construction made the car look heavy despite being light, how the tapered tail was good for aerodynamics but put off more conservative buyers. I assume an awful lot of cost and effort went into the 1.2 Tdi which couldn't be justified by results either.
 
207 interview with Sielaff: http://www.fourtitude.com/news/publish/Features/article_3044.shtml

I was lucky to be allowed to work immediately, very soon after I started then, on the Quattro Spyder Showcar in 1991 for the Frankfurt Motor Show and this was a great experience. Afterwards I did a lot of production work in Ingolstadt, the headquarters studio of Audi, but then I was also allowed to go to the little tiny Munich design studio were we developed work for Volkswagen and Audi and, in parallel, we built up a group design studio in Barcelona at that time for Audi, Volkswagen, and SEAT.

Then I moved there with my family, near the studio, to live in Barcelona for almost three years, doing work for Audi, Seat, and Volkswagen. Then after this experience, I was sent by Audi to lead the Munich studio, head the Munich studio and we did showcars for the A2 and also production for the A2 at that time in1997. In Frankfurt and in Tokyo we showed these concept cars to introduce the car and then also the production A2.

After this quite short experience in Munich I was asked to come back to Ingolstadt to be head of the interior design team. This lasted until 2002, I was doing all the production process for all the Audi interiors at that time.
 
Is it possible that Donckerwolke and Sielaff did not see eye to eye whilst working on the A2?

Sielaff replaced Donckerwolke as head of Bentley when Donckerwolke inexplicably left for Kia 2-3yrs after designing award winning models for Bentley.
 
How far apart were the launch dates/years of the A2 and TT? and what were the price differences? I always thought the TT being so popular effected the A2 in a way. I know they are very different cars and were marketed very differently but I wonder if it would have done better being launched before the TT or a while later? (I am probably very wrong here, but just a thought)
 
Conjecture about designers' feelings for each other aside, the A2 was a big failure for Audi, despite its various innovations - hence why they only sold 176,000 of them (by contrast, MB shifted over a million W168 A Classes).
 
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