Horch — August Horch's luxury cars from Zwickau, 1899 to 1958

Horch at a glance

August Horch: from Cologne to Zwickau

August Horch was born on 12 October 1868 in Winningen, in the Rhine Province. On 14 November 1899 the engineer and Salli Herz founded the company in Ehrenfeld, Cologne. Production of twin-cylinder cars began near Cologne in 1901.

In 1902 the business moved to Reichenbach im Vogtland, and in March that year the firm produced a 15 kW (20 hp) four-cylinder car with shaft drive. On 10 May 1904 Horch & Cie. Motorwagenwerke AG was founded as a joint-stock company in Zwickau, Saxony. The first six-cylinder engine followed in 1904 and reached production in 1907. In 1906 a Horch driven by Dr Rudolf Stöss won the Herkomer Competition.

The quarrel and the birth of Audi

In 1909 the supervisory board forced the founder out. On 16 July 1909 he founded a rival firm, also in Zwickau, called August Horch Automobilwerke GmbH. The former partners held the Horch name as a registered trademark, and a court ruled in their favour. The founder then chose a new name: "Audi", the Latin form of the German imperative "horch!" ("listen!"). The name Audi Automobilwerke was entered in the Zwickau register on 25 April 1910.

From then on, two car makers in the same town carried the founder's name in two languages. The founder left Audi in 1920 and moved to Berlin. In 1937 his autobiography, titled "I built cars" in English, was published.

Paul Daimler and the eight-cylinder Horch

In the 1920s the Zwickau company moved firmly into the luxury class. On 1 July 1923 Paul Daimler, eldest son of Gottlieb Daimler and the former technical director of Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft, became chief engineer in Zwickau. Daimler stayed until 1928 and developed the eight-cylinder Horch 8, which according to the Paul Daimler article "successfully challenged Mercedes-Benz". The brand's Wikipedia article says it was the first maker to put eight-cylinder engines into series production, a claim it marks as unconfirmed.

In 1928 Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen, the owner of DKW, bought the company. The model range of the late 1920s and early 1930s was wide:

Auto Union: the luxury brand of the four rings

On 29 June 1932 Horch, Audi, DKW and Wanderer merged to form Auto Union AG, based in Chemnitz. The four overlapping rings stood for the four brands. Inside the group, the Zwickau brand covered the luxury segment, with straight-eight, V8 and V12 engines.

The V8 Horch 830 family became the volume model. It was built from 1933 to 1940 as a saloon, roadster and cabriolet, and at least 11,000 were made at Zwickau before the war:

In 1936 the 25,000th eight-cylinder luxury car left the Zwickau works. Auto Union also went racing. It bought the P-Wagen project of Ferdinand Porsche, and the racing department in Zwickau built the Grand Prix types A to D from 1934 to 1939. Auto Union cars won 25 races from 1935 to 1937.

In the late 1930s Auto Union supplied the armed forces with vehicles such as the Horch 108 and the 901. Civilian production stopped in March 1940.

After the war: Zwickau and the last Horch

The Zwickau factories were heavily bombed during the war. In 1945 the group's plants in Saxony were dismantled as war reparations and the company's assets were liquidated without compensation. Zwickau became part of East Germany. The reformed company, Auto Union GmbH, was set up in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, on 3 September 1949, and August Horch remained an honorary executive there until his death on 3 February 1951.

The old works in Zwickau built one more car under the name: the six-cylinder P240, with a 2,407 cc engine. About 1,382 were made between 1955 and 1959. In 1958 the former Horch and Audi plants in Zwickau were combined, the new brand Sachsenring was created within the IFA group, and the car became the Sachsenring P240. After that the name went dormant.

The name returns with Audi

Ownership of the new company in the West changed several times: Daimler-Benz bought 87 per cent in April 1958, and Volkswagen took over the factory in Ingolstadt and the trademark rights in 1964. Auto Union merged with NSU in 1969, and the company was renamed Audi AG in 1985. In the mid-1980s Daimler-Benz transferred the Horch brand rights to Audi. In 1991 Volkswagen also acquired the Zwickau site.

In 2021 Audi brought the name back as a flagship version of the A8 for China, aimed at the Mercedes-Maybach S-Class. Pre-war cars of the brand are now collector's items: a 1937 Horch 853A Sport Cabriolet sold at auction in Cortland, New York, on 24 June 2006 for US$299,000.

The Horch models listed on 1cars are in the Horch catalogue, and the V8 car has its own page on the Horch 830 and its Zwickau V8. The later history of the four rings is told in the history of Audi, with the post-war Auto Union 1000 and the DKW Junior. More pre-war cars are in the classic cars section.

Horch timeline

Landmark Horch models

Photo gallery