Season four of Netflix drama The Crown has the nation gripped, as Lady Diana Spencer begins her royal romance with Prince Charles. But while the soon-to-be Princess Diana had a lasting effect on British life, her impact on Audi in the UK is less well documented.
It seems unlikely The Crown will devote an episode to Diana’s Audi, but we’ll gladly take up the challenge. After all, with a car history including a Jaguar XJS-C and Ford Escort RS Turbo, the Princess clearly had good taste.
Fire up the Quattro
Audi had spent the 1980s riding the crest of a Quattro wave as the quieter, more considered German car company. Its cars were well engineered and understated, appealing to those who didn’t long to see a Mercedes-Benz or BMW parked on the gravel driveway of their mock-Tudor commuter belt home.
Little changed in the 1990s. There were high points – the S2, S6 and RS2, for example – but these felt like token efforts, akin to Colin from accounts undoing his top button and loosening his tie, before downing half a pint of Beck’s.
Colin’s shirt collar wasn’t going to cut it. Audi needed an injection of glamour. Step forward the most famous person on the planet: Diana, Princess of Wales
Diana falls for a German
Before Diana, the royal family drove British cars. It was the done thing. But all that changed in 1991, when Diana leased a thoroughly German Mercedes-Benz 500 SL. It’s not clear whether Charles choked on his Laurent-Perrier, but the tabloids were up in arms.
This was 1991, the year in which, coincidentally, Audi launched the cabriolet version of its steadfast but abstemious 80 saloon. The roofless 80 could breeze past The Ivy without anyone looking up from their seared foie gras or beetroot carpaccio. No, when it came to top-down glamour, the SL, 3 Series and 900 were the main courses.
But nobody banked on Princess Diana taking a shine to Audi’s first production drop-top. Legend has it that Diana fell in love with the model having borrowed one belonging to the wife of Viscount Linley.
Never one to tow the line, and with her relationship with the Royal Family growing increasingly fractious, Diana set about bagging her second German. She wasn’t short of willing suitors.
Dovercourt Audi of St John’s Wood was quick to realise the potential of the world’s most photographed woman being seen at the wheel of its slow-selling cabriolet. Majesty magazine estimated that Princess Diana generated £14.5 million worth of publicity for products she was seen with, a fact not lost on the canny team at Dovercourt.
It was a match made in heaven. Diana had the car of her dreams, and Audi had a passport to riches. In 1994, Audi reported that sales almost doubled after Diana was seen driving the car. Hardly surprising, when a magazine with the Princess on the cover would expect to see a circulation increase of between 30-40 percent.
As Jeremy Clarkson said at the time: “She alone has turned what might have been just another nice car into by far and away the coolest and most sought-after-four-wheeled status symbol of them all”.
But this was no stage-managed exercise in product placement. Photos of Diana and her Audi captured moments in time, most famously with the young princes in the back, roof down, showcasing Audi’s reinforced windscreen surround, which provided enough roll-over protection without the need for an ugly superstructure.
Not that readers of Hello, Tatler or Vanity Fair were interested in roll-over protection and superstructures. They simply saw Audi as a chance to live the life of a Princess, albeit without the constant gaze of the paparazzi.
These were different times when column inches were the media’s currency, long before the days of sponsored tweets and paid Instagram posts. Diana drove an Audi because she fancied one. As a result, the relationship felt more authentic. More believable.
Don’t pay the Ferry, man
Sure, Iron Man ‘chose’ an Audi R8, but when Loren Angelo, director of marketing for Audi of America, justified the product placement, there was a shallowness to the rationale. “When we read the script for Iron Man, he was someone who was self-made. He utilised technology and a certain level of personal intelligence to create things,” Angelo told Automotive News.
“That was a perfect fit for Audi because that’s exactly what we’ve done with our brand.”
Whatever. Just admit it, Tony Stark is a cool dude, and you kinda knew that a film that would gross nearly $100m in its opening weekend would be really beneficial for your profile. Oh, and everybody likes Robert Downey Jr, right?
And when Bryan Ferry drove to Sheffield, did he have to copy Audi in?
Drive to Sheffield @Audi pic.twitter.com/VYhdA2YHnr
— Bryan Ferry (@bryanferry) November 7, 2013
Back to Diana. In 1991, Audi sold 14,344 cars in the UK. By 2008, that number had increased to 100,845. Vorsprung Durch Umsatz, as Geoffrey Palmer nearly drawled.
Was Diana responsible for Audi’s ascent to the automotive top table, where it would rub shoulders with BMW and Mercedes? Not solely. But did she play a part? Absolutely.
Fit for a Princess?
The 1994 Audi 80 Cabriolet seen here is one of at least three examples driven by Diana in the mid-1990s. Back in 2016, L449 TRP sold for £54,000, having been cherished as a piece of royal history for its entire life.
L541 GJD passed into private ownership and was used a family car between 2004 and 2009. It was then stored away once the link to Diana became apparent.
Princess Diana’s charitable work left a lasting legacy following her death in 1997. Twenty-three years on, Audi is still benefiting from her brief time with an unassuming German.
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