DKW Aero 1933

DKW Aero 1933 by Autocult

Trial Balloon  

If you ask for relevant trends in automotive development that apply to the whole decade of the 1930s, especially two important trends come to mind. On the one hand it is the trend to develop a car for the masses, the “people’s car, and on the other hand it is the trend to position the engine in the rear of the car. How both trends merged in Porsches’ design for Volkswagen is well known.   Also the Auto-Union AG – the retroactively renamed network of the companies Audi, DKW, Horch and Wanderer – was not able to avoid these trends. Beginning of 1933 a new prototype with streamlined body work and a 600 cc two-cycle rear engine was built at the DKW plant in Berlin-Spandau. The car body was designed by Horch body maker Hermann Ahrens in late summer 1932. Beside the design of an V8, rear engine Horch in the style of a Tatra 77, the streamlined DKW was his last design for the new Auto Union before he joined Daimler-Benz.   The car body was built in a proven way – wooden framework covered with synthetic leather. Compared to the standard DKW Front model the driving characteristics became noticeable worse, but according to a contemporary report this could not bring the responsible persons at the Auto Union to abandon the traditional front-wheel drive design for the prototype with a rear engine.   Except two lines in a memorandum and some pictures, no documentation of the prototype have survived to this day. The prototype registered with the license plate IV-36142 remained the only built copy. Its later fate is unknown.