Audi 100GL Automatic

'Brown is the new Black....!'

At the moment my insurance company has provisioned for me a VW Passat MKVI 2.0 Tdi Sport. The A5 PQ46 to give it it's full name. The engine is a 2 litre I4 and it rattles along. I can't find a decent driving position, but I know that it would last forever if so asked and it's designed to least offend.

It's a medium size, family car, that can happily accomodate all those common rep needs. An all rounder. It's medium size in the model firmament, but it's actually quite big.
Anyway, I'd arrived home and realising that I'd gone through the Congestion Charge zone after leaving Docklands, made the call to TfL to pay the £8 fee.

"Hi, sir, how was your day?"
'The week has been terrible. The days are all bad.'
"Sorry to hear that sir. How would you like to pay....?"

We went through all the formalities - I'm a registered user but this car wasn't listed against me, of course. Then he said:

"With the registration you've given me, sir, it is a Brown VW Passat 2.0 Tdi. Is that correct, sir?"
'Eh? No, the car is black!'
"It says browwwnnnn here, sir."
'Wha????'

I went outside to check, and sure enough just barely perceptible under the streetlamp I could tell that the car I thought was black, had driven around thinking was black, was actually in fact.....brown. Just the tiniest hue and shade away from Midnight, but the closer I looked, it was there. Just. Wow. So brown, it's black. Brown, the new black.

I paid my charge.

Just driving home today, I was thinking about how roomy the Passat is, and how cars have grown. In the two lanes in front of me was a W124 E-class, and immediately on it's right....an E60 520d. Nominally these two cars are in the same sector. The E-class has always battled the 5-series. With the A6 hanging around, Passat's larding it up, Mondeo's filling vacuums.....The E60 was in every way far bigger than the W124. How cars have grown! The E60 is in effect a replacement, in a 'fit-for'purpose' way for an old S-Class. Or an old 7-Series. The old A8 begat the new Passat. Cars are growing out of their models and segments and realignment has to happen. Granadas become Scorpios then the model line dies, as the new Sierra, (sorry Mondeo Mk1!!!) takes over....

Therefore when I saw this lovely Audi 100 GL Automatic (C1), I was surprised. Surprised mainly that a car like this has survived relatively unscathed, and surprised that I'd seen it in the evening gloom, surrounded by bloated Focuses and Golfs. The C1 gave way to the C2 and the 100 became the 200. The C3 platform took Audi through much of the 80's with it's lauded low drag coefficent figure of 0.30.
This fact was heavily marketed and the car sold very well. A deviation of the platform was the Audi V8 (which you can also find on this site and always wins people over when they see it. A rarity). And then in the early nineties we saw the C4 platform. Basically the original A6. By the time the second generation A6 came out in 1998 - the C5 platform - well, placed next to the Mk5 Passat of the time, what was the huge difference? I know there are differences with the B and C platforms, but to the untutored eye the lines and models are seguing into one. Growing into the segments. You want a new C-Class? Used to have an old e39 520i? Try out an Audi A6. Hmmm, or for a little less go for a Passat that's built on that Audi's baby brother's platform. The new entry level ride has taken over the segment dominated by it's rival manufacturers previous family sized executive range.

Brown, the new black.

Audi 100GL Automatic. The platform made this, at the time, the largest car Audi had made. Tiny now. But the model line, as I've glided through above, has squired a range of cars that have grown larger and larger. In a way this car is responsible for Audi's recent model change. At the time of inception, the design for this car, brought into play the front-engined water-cooled setup that would dominate their thinking until the introduction of the A5 and the MLP platform. For quite a time Audis were differentiated by their nose heavy engine loading, heavily compensated by clever weight redistribution and even quattro technology on some models. MLP changes this and indirectly ends a thematic that started, incongrously, with the original C1 Audi 100.