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German carmaker Audi has been using "vorsprung durch technik" as its advertising tagline for more than 20 years. It is generally accepted to mean "advancement through technology", although vorsprung on its own means "to leap ahead".
That's one of the hiccups in translations. In this case English cannot
fully capture the meaning of the German word vorsprung.
German cannot always capture the meaning of English either, not by a long shot. The saying "Don't overdo it" translates into German as "Leave the church in the village."
The expression "We are not out of the woods yet" becomes "The cow is not off the ice" in German.
Gerhard Köstner knows these things. The 70-year-old German has been an English translator all his working life.
He was in Italy at the launch of the Audi A5 and S5 at Verona, making sure that busy multi-lingual Audi executives weren't slipping up and leaving "churches in villages".
He reckons he has the best job in the world.
"I'm the chairman of the board of a company with one employee - me," he says.
Köstner started work with the German Government in 1961, when the Berlin Wall went up. A year later he left Bonn for the West German embassy in Washington DC and the most influential cocktail circuit in the world. He was 25.
But the posting brought with it an unseen problem. After two months he hadn't been paid. Bonn said his salary was going into the embassy's Washington bank, but the bank said it had no Köstner on its books. There was a Koestner, however.
Enter the language gremlins. The bank's English accounting system didn't recognise the two dots above the "o" in Köstner. This is an umlaut, a German word. It has the effect of adding an "e" after the vowels a, o, and u.
Someone in the US bank figured an umlaut would look better as an "e" anyway and changed Köstner to Koestner. It stayed that way for commercial convenience.
Köstner without the "e" spent most of the tumultuous 1960s in the US capital.
He met President Kennedy, after Kennedy had delivered his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech near the Berlin Wall in June, 1963. Five months later Kennedy was shot dead and Lyndon Johnson was president.
Köstner went from interpreting for his bosses in Bonn the nasal tones of Boston-bred Kennedy to the "y'all" drawl of Texan Johnson. Then came Richard Nixon in 1968 and more inflections.
These days Köstner is semi-retired and living with his wife on the shores of Lake Eibsee in Bavaria. His favourite movie is My Fair Lady, the 1964 release with Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle. He watches it regularly. It's a language thing.
"Vorsprung durch technik" first cropped up in 1977, when Köstner was back in Germany and Ferdinand Piech, the current chairman of the supervisory board of Audi parent the Volkswagen Group, and the man who engineered the recent Porsche buyout of around 30 per cent of VW, was the chief technical director of a project to develop an all-wheel-drive Audi.
Piech is said to have coined the phrase. A few years later, the influential Audi quattro coupe was born. The two-door Audi A5/S5 is its spiritual successor. Audi says it is a product of the essence of vorsprung durch technik: to question existing concepts and adopt innovative approaches.
The A5 is a lot more, too. It introduces an all-new architecture that will underpin every new Audi for the next 10 years, from the A4, A6 and A8 sedans to next year's A4-based four-wheel-drive wagon.
The main change in how Audis from the A5 on will be put together is to the engine bay and front suspension.
Audi has redesigned the front underbody to position the engine lower and further back in the engine bay in an effort to more evenly distribute the overall front:rear weight of the car compared with previous Audis.
It also put the battery in the boot. The result, it says, is an all-round better driver's car.
There is another reason for the change. Safety legislation is forcing carmakers to design more pedestrian-friendly models and Audi to comply had to redesign the front of its cars. It has pretty much always had its engines hanging over the front axles.
Theoretically, the ideal front/rear weight distribution is 50:50 per cent. The A5 coupe manages a best front/rear weight split of 53:47. That's for the entry-level, front-drive 1.8-litre four-cylinder model.
The heavier 3-litre V6 turbo-diesel with six-speed manual gearbox and all-wheel-drive offers the worst - 58:42. But that's on paper.
On a mix of winding mountain roads and motorways around Verona, the oil-burning A5 quattro coupe and its blistering mid-range power advances the arguments for performance diesels considerably.
Its engine delivers 176kW (236bhp) between 4000-4400rpm and 500Nm of torque from 1500-3000rpm. All this oomph while returning claimed fuel consumption of 7.2-litres/100km (40mpg) on the city/country cycle.
The premium go-fast S5 splits its weight 56:44. It is the only model in the new coupe line-up to be powered by the 4.2-litre V8 petrol engine used elsewhere in the Audi range.
In the S5, the V8 and its delightfully rumbling exhaust note delivers 260kW (350bhp) at 7000rpm and 440Nm at 3500rpm and launches the car from zero to 100km/h in a claimed 5.1 seconds - less than a second quicker than the 5.9 seconds for the A5 turbo-diesel. It, too, is equipped with a six-speed manual box.
Real-world comparisons will be interesting when the two cars make it to New Zealand. The S5 arrives first, in September. No word on price yet, but it is expected to be around $150,000-$160,000. The A5 turbo-diesel arrives early next year. An A5 with a 3.2-litre petrol V6 and multitronic transmission is expected later.
Both S5 and A5 quattro coupes are supremely efficient rather than inspiring. The quality of cabin materials and fit and finish continues to set the industry standard. But the cabin itself, while offering ample room for driver and front seat passenger, is cramped in the back. So, of course, was the original Audi quattro coupe.
