It’s Time For Some Good Old Auto Union Weirdos: Cold Start

I feel like it’s been a while since we’ve really reveled in the good mid-century, beautifully illustrated madness of an Auto Union brochure, so I’m going to take care of that right now. This particular brochure is a good one because it’s for a very interesting Auto Union, the 1000 SP. Really, this car was a two-stroke DKW (remember, the Auto Union was composed of DKW, Horch, Wanderer, and Audi) but it was dressed up as something that looked for all the world like a shrunken Ford Thunderbird.

If you always wanted a Thunderbird but could never commit because the car was just too damn big and had too many engine cycles and not enough pale blue oil smoke, then the Auto Union 1000 SP is definitely the car for you.

I think it’s good to look and reflect how obvious it was that Auto Union was cribbing from the Thunderbird – it’s not an exact copy, but it’s quite clearly inspired by and definitely feels Thunderbirdy – because so many carmakers got a start “borrowing” heavily from other carmakers, design-wise. Accusations of copying styles have most recently been leveled at the Chinese car industry, and before that the Korean, and before that Japanese, and so on, so it’s good to remember that just about every major automaker has indulged in a little cribbing here and there. Nobody is a saint.

But back to the brochure and its weirdos! The car is, of course, a charming machine, but let’s take a look at who is hanging out around it:

Let’s zoom in a little closer; Computer! Zoom, and enhance!

What’s going on here? Who is Captain Emerald, there? Is he with Lady Saffron, or is she a friend of The Scarlet Sweater? Is Cap’n Emerald there to take pictures? Is he a real captain, or a photographer in a novel hat?

“But dad, I don’t want to go in the trunk with the luggage.”

“I’m sorry, Enkidu, but you know the poodle doesn’t like darkness. And the poodle has papers. You don’t.”

I think the remarkable thing in this image above, aside from the interesting shading choice that makes the paint look like a chrome-to-ruby ombre, is the absolutely massive ascot on the guy with the golf bag:

That’s an ample ascot, a colossal cravat. It’s like a whole damn towel, or bedsheet, and I have to admit, I’m kind of taken by that lapel-less jacket, which looks like the sort of thing they’d use in a movie where they want to show a businessman in the year, oh, 2145.

Are these guys racing, or just driving recklessly down a mountain road in the rain? They seem to be wearing hemets, which feels wise, though I’m not sure the goggles are that efficacious in a car with a full roof and windshield.

Man, I love this era of car brochures; the world seems to be such a strange and colorful, if deeply and subtly unsettling, place.