DKW F102
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The DKW F102 is a passenger car that was produced from August 1963 by the German manufacturer
Auto Union Auto Union AG, was an amalgamation of four German automobile manufacturers, founded in 1932 and established in 1936 in Chemnitz, Saxony. It is the immediate predecessor of Audi as it is known today. As well as acting as an umbrella firm f ...
. Superseding the
Auto Union 1000 The Auto Union 1000 is a luxury compact front-wheel drive automobile manufactured by Auto Union GmbH between 1958 and 1965. It was the first (and in many markets the last) model branded as an Auto Union by the manufacturer since the 1930's; it ...
, it was the last model branded as a
DKW DKW (''Dampf-Kraft-Wagen'', en, "steam-powered car", also ''Deutsche Kinder-Wagen'' en, "German children's car". ''Das-Kleine-Wunder'', en, "the little wonder" or ''Des-Knaben-Wunsch'', en, "the boy's wish"- from when the company built to ...
by the manufacturer and also the last
West German West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 O ...
production car equipped with a
two-stroke engine A two-stroke (or two-stroke cycle) engine is a type of internal combustion engine that completes a power cycle with two strokes (up and down movements) of the piston during one power cycle, this power cycle being completed in one revolution of t ...
.


General

The last European built
Auto Union 1000 The Auto Union 1000 is a luxury compact front-wheel drive automobile manufactured by Auto Union GmbH between 1958 and 1965. It was the first (and in many markets the last) model branded as an Auto Union by the manufacturer since the 1930's; it ...
and 1000S models were produced in July 1963 and the DKW F102 was presented as a replacement model in September 1963. The F102 was initially available as a two-door sedan from March 1964 with four door cars joining them on the production line in January 1965.Werner Oswald: ''Deutsche Autos 1945–1990'', vol. 4, , p. 421 While the design of its predecessor, the Auto Union 1000, essentially came from the late 1930s, the F102 was a newly designed vehicle with a
unibody A vehicle frame, also historically known as its '' chassis'', is the main supporting structure of a motor vehicle to which all other components are attached, comparable to the skeleton of an organism. Until the 1930s, virtually every car ha ...
and - in keeping with contemporary taste - with large glass surfaces and little chrome. The new price of the two-door sedan was DM 7,200. The vehicle has a front suspension on double wishbones with
torsion bar A torsion bar suspension, also known as a torsion spring suspension, is any vehicle suspension that uses a torsion bar as its main weight-bearing spring. One end of a long metal bar is attached firmly to the vehicle chassis; the opposite end termi ...
s. The rear torsion crank axle (rigid axle) hangs on longitudinally installed support levers (trailing arms), which are sprung from a transverse torsion bar. If the compression is uneven, the axle beam twists and acts as a stabilizer. A
Panhard rod A Panhard rod (also called Panhard bar, track bar, or track rod) is a suspension link that provides lateral location of the axle. Originally invented by the Panhard automobile company of France in the early twentieth century, this device has been ...
is used for lateral guidance. Since the axle takes up a lot of space, the tank is housed behind it in the floor of the trunk, where the spare wheel is also located behind the rear seat's back. Like its predecessors, the F102 was equipped with a (then) state-of-the-art three-cylinder
two-stroke A two-stroke (or two-stroke cycle) engine is a type of internal combustion engine that completes a Thermodynamic power cycle, power cycle with two strokes (up and down movements) of the piston during one power cycle, this power cycle being comple ...
in-line engine. The two-stroke mixture was generated by the new "fresh oil system" developed jointly with Bosch, which automatically mixes the lubricant with the gasoline from a separate oil tank in the engine compartment, which should simplify refueling and reduce oil consumption. The driver could fill up with pure gasoline with no added oil.


Release and problems

While the
DKW Junior The DKW Junior was a small front wheel drive saloon manufactured by Auto Union AG. The car received a positive reaction when first exhibited, initially badged as the DKW 600, at the Frankfurt Motor Show in March 1957. The ‘Junior’ name was g ...
was still the most successful small car in West Germany at the time, customers started to find the two-stroke engine to be inconvenient and generally outdated. This led to F102 not achieving the sales figures that the company had hoped for and caused Auto Union serious economic problems. The causes of this quite abrupt loss of image included problems with the automatic fresh oil system: After cold winter nights, the oil in the reservoir was so viscous that the engine could not be lubricated, as was the case with prolonged coasting (downhill driving), so that many engines were damaged by piston seizures and galling. Such problems in the cold could have been contained with modern fully synthetic motor oils with a high
viscosity index The viscosity index (VI) is an arbitrary, unit-less measure of a fluid's change in viscosity relative to temperature change. It is mostly used to characterize the viscosity-temperature behavior of lubricating oils. The lower the VI, the more the v ...
, but such oils were not yet available in the
1960s File:1960s montage.png, Clockwise from top left: U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War; the Beatles led the British Invasion of the U.S. music market; a half-a-million people participate in the 1969 Woodstock Festival; Neil Armstrong and Buzz ...
. Warranty and goodwill services put a strain on the balance sheet and customer confidence. Another problem, especially of the F102 model, was the fact that the three-cylinder with 400 cm³ displacement per cylinder had reached the end of its development possibilities and even larger two-stroke engines were not established in the automotive industry. In order to reduce the gasoline consumption, which is quite high in everyday operation, DKW resorted to a simple and successful means after a few months of production. Halfway through spring kinematics, the accelerator pedal was subjected to a significantly increased resistance to give the driver a better feeling for the power he was demanding from the engine. Such an accelerator pedal with a pressure point was also later used in the
Trabant 601 The Trabant 601 (or Trabant P601 series) was a Trabant model produced by VEB Sachsenring in Zwickau, Saxony. It was the third generation of the model, built for the longest production time, from 1964 to 1990. As a result, it is the best-known Trab ...
, whose fuel consumption was also regarded unfavorably high due to the two-stroke cycle in relation to the engine output.


End of production

Attempts with a two-stroke V6 engine failed. The era of two-stroke engines in West German automobile construction ended with the F102. By March 1966, 52,753 (or possibly 53,053) vehicles were produced, of which only about 25,000 could be sold. It was the last model developed by Auto Union before the
Volkswagen Volkswagen (),English: , . abbreviated as VW (), is a German Automotive industry, motor vehicle manufacturer headquartered in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. Founded in 1937 by the German Labour Front under the Nazi Party and revived into a ...
take-over and with the end of production of the DKW F102, which was officially sold as Auto Union, the DKW brand disappeared from the car market. Under Volkswagen control, the F102 provided the basis for the later
Audi F103 F103 is the internal designation for a series of car models produced by Auto Union GmbH (after merger with NSU Motorenwerke in 1969: Audi NSU Auto Union) in West Germany from 1965 to 1972, derived from the earlier DKW F102. To signify the change ...
models and revived the
Audi Audi AG () is a German automotive manufacturer of luxury vehicles headquartered in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany. As a subsidiary of its parent company, the Volkswagen Group, Audi produces vehicles in nine production facilities worldwide. Th ...
brand that existed in what was then Auto Union before the Second World War, in 1938.


Müller-Andernach engine

The engineer Hans Müller in Andernach (1902–1968) developed a six-cylinder V-two-stroke engine in the early 1960s, which, according to his own description, worked like two three-cylinder engines on a common crankshaft and was initially planned as a boat engine with different cubic capacities up to 1.6 liters. As a car engine, it had a displacement of 1288 cc with a bore of 62.5 mm and a stroke of 70 mm. The power was specified with 80 PS (59 kW) at 3800 rpm; the maximum torque was 15.4 mkp or 150 Nm. For test drives with the six-cylinder engine built by Heinkel, the F102 was converted to radial tires of size 165–14; consumption was 9.5 liters of regular petrol per 100 kilometers. However, the engine was not taken into series production. It was then planned that the Bayreuth Motor Company, founded in 1966, would build it independently of Auto Union to replace the three-cylinder engine, but this turned out to be uneconomical. Probably only a few demonstration cars were built.Siegfried Rauch/Frank Rönicke: 2 Takte – 4 Räder. 1. Auflage, Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 2016, , P. 90–95. At 83 kg, the V6 engine was hardly heavier than the standard R3 engine. The additional power of around 20 hp compared to the three-cylinder engine was hardly noticeable at top speed. A total of around 100 engines were built, which after the takeover of DKW were also installed in the DKW F12 or used as boat engines in individual cases.


Technical details

* L2 = 2-door saloon * L4 = 4-door saloon


Notes


References


External links


photos
{{Auto Union (Europe) timeline 1950-1968 F102 Front-wheel-drive vehicles