Misplaced Pages

Jörg Bensinger

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
German automobile engineer
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
The topic of this article may not meet Misplaced Pages's notability guideline for biographies. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted.
Find sources: "Jörg Bensinger" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (May 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous.
Find sources: "Jörg Bensinger" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (May 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
(Learn how and when to remove this message)

Jörg Bensinger is a German automotive chassis engineer, who pioneered four-wheel drive (all-wheel) transmission for conventional (on-road) automobiles in the 1980s, first developing the idea in 1977.

Career

Audi

He joined the R&D department of Audi in 1968.

Four wheel-drive

He tested a Volkswagen Iltis, a four-wheel drive military off-road vehicle, with another engineer Roland Gumpert in the late 1970s in Finland. He proposed a four-wheel drive road vehicle in February 1977 to Ferdinand Piëch, the head of R&D at Audi and Walter Treser [de]. The go-ahead was given to test the idea with an Audi 80, with an allrad (all-wheel) design, without a centre differential. Parts from an Audi 100 were also taken to produce the new transmission design.

The car received the backing from the board of management of Audi in September 1977. The vehicle was tested on the Turracher Höhe Pass in Austria, one of the steepest routes in Europe, climbing the snow-covered 23% gradient without snow tyres. The vehicle was given to the head of R&D at Volkswagen, the Austrian Ernst Fiala, to test. A main feature is the dual-direction transmission system invented by Audi's head of transmission, Franz Tengler.

The new car, the Audi Quattro, under head of Audi design Hartmut Warkuß, was launched in Europe in 1980. It had a 2.1 litre turbocharged ten-valve straight-five engine that produced 197 bhp; it could go from 0-60 mph in seven seconds. The car, driven by Michèle Mouton, entered the 1981 World Rally Championship, and dominated the World Rally Championship (WRC) for the next years.

Personal

He married Jutta Raisch, who is also a glider pilot. They fly their gliders from Vaumeilh airfield.

See also

References

  1. "Car Keys". Retrieved 28 June 2020.
  2. "Which Car". Retrieved 28 June 2020.
  3. "Fly Drive Madeira". Retrieved 8 July 2023.
  4. "Obituary of Ferdinand Piech". Classic and Sports Car. Retrieved 28 June 2020.
  5. "100 Best Cars Ever Made". Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 28 June 2020.
Audi
Subsidiaries
Defunct brands
Museums
Current models
Cars
SUVs/Crossovers
Audi Sport
Audi S:
Audi RS:
Historic and
discontinued models
Motorsport
Cars
Series
Concept cars
See also
Categories: