Qualla: Horch

Horch: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mr. Wissenschaft, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1909 a Saxon engineer lost the right to use his own name. August Horch had founded Horch & Cie. in Zwickau, quarrelled with his chief financial officer, and been pushed out by his own supervisory board. He walked a short distance across town and started a second car company - only to find that Horch was a registered trademark he no longer controlled. The German verb horchen means listen. The son of one of his Zwickau business partners supplied the answer: the Latin imperative for the same instruction is audi. On 25 April 1910 the name Audi Automobilwerke went into the Zwickau company register, and a man who had been legally erased from his own brand carried on building cars under a translation of himself.

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Image: Mr. Wissenschaft | CC BY-SA 3.0

Horch: Candle Lamps and an Alloy Crankcase

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Derbrauni, CC BY 4.0. Horch had learned the trade under Karl Benz, running production for him before setting out on his own. On 14 November 1899, with a partner named Salli Herz, he opened a workshop in Ehrenfeld on the edge of Cologne. The first car he built there had a 4.5 hp engine and an aluminium...

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Image: Derbrauni | CC BY 4.0

Horch: Eight Cylinders and the Four Rings

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Norbert Schnitzler, CC BY-SA 3.0. The brand outgrew its founder. Horch designed a six-cylinder engine in 1904 that reached the market in 1907, and after Paul Daimler arrived as chief engineer in 1923 the firm became the first in Germany to put straight-eights into series production. That set the pattern for every...

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Image: Norbert Schnitzler | CC BY-SA 3.0

Horch: The Racing Department and What It Cost

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matěj Baťha, CC BY-SA 2.5. Auto Union's Grand Prix cars were designed and built inside the Horch works at Zwickau between 1933 and 1939. Ferdinand Porsche put the engine behind the driver, which almost nobody else was doing, and the Types A through D grew to nearly 550 hp - enough for Bernd Rosemeyer to ta...

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Image: Matěj Baťha | CC BY-SA 2.5

Horch: Dismantled, Then Renamed

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Softeis, CC BY-SA 3.0. Zwickau ended the war in the Soviet zone. The factories were taken apart as reparations, the surviving Grand Prix cars shipped to Moscow to be reverse-engineered, and Auto Union AG was liquidated without compensation on 17 August 1948. Executives who had reached the west founded ...

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Image: Softeis | CC BY-SA 3.0

Horch: A Dormant Name Wakes Up

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Derbrauni, CC BY 4.0. Volkswagen bought the Zwickau site in 1991, the year the last Trabant was built, and put up a new plant at Mosel just north of the town; since 2021 it has been assembling the Audi Q4 e-tron, which returned Audi-badged production to Zwickau after more than eighty years. The Horch ...

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Image: Derbrauni | CC BY 4.0