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The recent death of Ferdinand Piëch reminded me of a question I had been wondering about. How important was Volkswagen's purchase of Auto Union in 1964 and NSU Motorenwerke in 1969, merging them to create what we now know as Audi? VW kept the Beetle in production longer than they probably should, there seem to have been several development projects carried out to create a replacement but for technical or personal reasons none were gone ahead with. I've come across several sources which state that Audi was very important as Auto Union and NSU brought experience with water-cooled front-engines and front-wheel drive so it got me wondering how important actually was the knowledge they brought?
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