So, when you saw the 1995 Audi TT concept coupe for the very first time, did you think ‘wow, that’s very Bauhaus’?
Or did you think several other things like, ‘that looks weird, but amazing.’ Or, ‘I want one’. Or perhaps, ‘from the rear, doesn’t the shape of its roof look a little bit like a WW2 Nazi soldier’s helmet?’ a thought you might not utter out loud in these politically correct times, although it was quite hard not to think it.
It was even harder to avoid thinking – very much – that we wanted Audi to make this car, inadvertent visual referencing or not. Never mind Bauhaus – ‘sitting outside my house’ was how many of us wistfully imagined this car back in 1998, when the finished thing arrived.
Brave was certainly a word to describe that 1995 Audi TT concept, for there was simply no other car quite like it.
Brave turned out to be appropriate to the TT coupe world in another, less desirable way, this characteristic a requirement if you planned on driving TT at speeds of 110mph or more. If a sudden lane change was needed – quite likely on a German autobahn – the TT could turn alarmingly uncertain, the rear-end breakaway intended to make it entertaining on the limit catching out several drivers, a few fatally.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Audi needed three years to convert the frenzied enthusiasm for the concept into the finished article.
Impressively, changes between the concept and production model were remarkably few.
The most obvious was the addition of a pair of small extra side windows let into the TT’s helmet-like roof just aft of the doors, making it easier to see out, obviously, and making the cabin’s capping look a little less like an obsolete item of protective military headgear.
Buried deep below that striking roofline lay the reason why it was possible for Audi to actually make the TT. That reason was called PQ34, this being the codename for the platform that was the building block of vast numbers of Volkswagen Group vehicles at the turn of the century.
This extensive hardware set ran to a lot more than the floorpan and bulkhead that we usually understood a platform to mean, and included suspension systems, powertrains, heating and ventilation systems, seat frames and electrical architecture.
VW boss Ferdinand Piech was the main driver behind this huge component sharing strategy, which not only made relatively low volume models viable, but also allowed the cost-savings to be spent on upgrading the quality of vital models like the Volkswagen Golf, the contemporaneous Mk4 rich with soft-feel structures, classy rubberised finishes and – yes! – damped-action grab handles.
