What Do the Four Audi Rings Mean?

In 1932 four Saxon carmakers joined to form Auto Union: Audi, DKW, Horch and Wanderer. The Danish engineer Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen, who ran DKW, had bought a majority of Audiwerke in 1928 and was one of Auto Union's co-founders. The rings are the symbol of that consolidation. Each ring is one of the member companies, and they overlap because the companies were now one group.

The brand's own account reads the rings from left to right as Audi, DKW, Horch and Wanderer. Audi has not published a more detailed reading of the interlocking shape, so ideas about strength or unity are interpretation.

Horch was founded by August Horch in Cologne in 1899 and moved to Zwickau in 1904. After a dispute with his partners he left, and in 1909 he set up a second firm. A court barred him from using his own name, so the new company became Audi, the Latin form of horch, which is German for listen. It was entered in the Zwickau register on 25 April 1910.

DKW was the maker run by Rasmussen, and Wanderer is the fourth ring, standing for the car-producing part of the Wanderer company. The photo shows August Horch, whose two companies account for two of the four rings, one by name and one by its Latin translation.

Before 1945 the rings were mostly seen on Auto Union's grand prix racing cars, like the Type C above. The road cars of the group kept the emblems of their own member brands, and the archive's 1932 file shows four separate round emblems side by side rather than interlocked rings.

After the war the Zwickau factories ended up in Soviet-controlled East Germany, and a new Auto Union was launched in Ingolstadt in 1949, the year the archive shows the interlocking rings with an Auto Union band across them. Volkswagen took control in 1964 and relaunched the Audi name, and when Auto Union merged with NSU in 1969 the modern company took shape. The rings moved back to the front in the 1990s after Audi formed its own dealer network in 1994.

The idea is popularly attributed to Klaus von Oertzen, a sales director at Wanderer, and sometimes tied to the Olympic rings of the 1936 Games. Both are described as popular belief, not documented fact, so treat them with care. No single designer is firmly documented for the rings.

Over time the style has changed even though the count has not. The 1995 version shades the rings like chrome with a red wordmark below. The 2016 mark is flat and black with no lettering at all, while cars such as the R8 above still wear a chrome version on the hood.