Did Audi Really Make A Four Wheel Steer Quattro Prototype?

I’ve never seen it and had no idea they did it – the four wheel steer Audi quattro prototype. Built back in 1984 Audi must have been thinking that this would be the ultimate addition to the quattro. Many Japanese manufacturers have used 4WS to good effect, but it wasn’t until the Nissan GT-R started to use it in 1985. The most popular or most commonly found early example in the UK was the Honda Prelude. But that was launched in 1987. Not too many of them left now.

Thinking about it, Nissan, Honda, Mazda and Mitsubishi are the most obvious adopters of 4WS back then. This fashion continued into the 1990s too. Mitsubishi fitted the system to the Galant VR-4 from 1987 and entered the World Rally Championship with great success in 1989. Pentti Airikkala even won the Lombard RAC Rally that year. I was saw Ari Vatanen see him do the same event the following year to take fourth place. Mitsubishi did disconnect the 4WS system for the rally cars though. There were probably several good reasons to do that.
What were Audi thinking back in 1984 and would they have made this a success? They’d already stolen a march on the rest of the world producing an all-wheel drive sports car. They weren’t the first to try, but they were the first to make is a success and sell them. The World Rally Championship wins would have certainly helped there.

Looking at the angle of the rear wheels there’s quite a bit of steering lock. Certainly, more than some of the cars that made production. That’s not an easy thing to do with a four wheel drive.

So what stopped them? Complexity, costs, additional weight? I may never know, but I’d like to find out. Audi apparently has the car at the museum in Ingolstadt, somewhere I hope to be visiting.