We paid a visit to Autovision during our trip to Hockenheim Historic last month. The museum sustains a wonderful collection dedicated to the possibilities and visions of mobility. With its focus on technology, it proved to be a worthy addition to the classic race weekend.
The area is an automotive pilgrimage hotspot with the magnificent duo of technical museums in Sinsheim and Speyer, so if you haven’t been there, you should definitely add them to your programme, like we did for the Hockenheim Historic.
Autovision is a smaller museum, but it will surely suffice for several hours of entertainment and education. On Sunday morning, we also encountered the owner, who gave a very interesting presentation, sharing several stories about the Museum and its artefacts.
An unrivalled collection of NSU vehicles
The building is laid out on three levels, stuffed with automotive icons and tech demonstrations, split into specific exhibitions. The ground floor and gallery of the left wing is dedicated to the prewar period of the NSU brand.
It is not just the fact that the ground floor hosts a dozen prewar NSU models of every size and purpose, from race cars to delivery trucks. The museum claims to upkeep the world’s largest NSU prewar collection, and we are glad to believe it. But it’s not just the size: we spotted several individual exhibits that you will never encounter anywhere else. And it does not end with this: there will be further NSU vehicles downstairs, in the postwar / future segment.
The upper floor of the gallery is dedicated to NSU’s motorcycle division, with about a dozen rare prewar motorcycles.
The curators also ensured ample decoration, in fact so dense that you have to stop at every corner to wonder about them. The reenacted service centre is quite lovely, but we also adored the history of children’s toys exhibited on the wall.
A truly 3D experience…
The underground floor housed the postwar NSU collection, including several two- and four-wheel specimens.
Autovision is one of the most educational museums we ever saw
Autovision is one of the most educational museums we ever saw
Next to the NSU gallery, we found a technological exhibition featuring mechanical simulators and engines that illustrate various aspects of automotive technology and development.
The next segment (in the centre) features metal models to illustrate mechanical car parts such as engines, automatic transmission and differentials. Finally, interactive boxes showcase scientific experiments in physics under real conditions on mechanics, caloric theory, optics and acoustics, magnetism, electricity, and Electrochemistry.
The second part of the gallery lies above the Wankel exhibition and illustrates the diverse use cases (or rather adventures) of this technology from police motorcycle to Jetski (pulling a water-skier, just as weird as the technology itself), accompanied by prepped engines to present the evolution of Wankel engine development.
The ground floor under the gallery continues the Wankel theme and presents cars and maquettes that rely on this fateful technology.
The thematic concludes with a recreation of Felix Wankel’s office with authentic furniture. Autovision presents arguably the best Wankel exhibition we’ve ever seen, with far more exhibits than the Mazda Museum or the temporary exhibition we saw in the Audi Forum.
The first exhibit is the original tech demo of the NSU RO80 from the IAA 1967 premiere. With its open body panels, it allows visual access to its innovative technology. This groundbreaking car graced the covers of car magazines and brought the first Car of the Year title for a German manufacturer. Sadly, its world-premiere engine was also the reason for its downfall, dragging the small company down with it.
The next car is an NSU Wankel Spider, the first series production car with a Wankel engine.
The next vehicle is a Hover Hawk MKIII Hovercraft used by postal operators in the Nordic countries. When the usual routes froze over in winter, conventional postal boats without icebreakers had no chance of reaching some of the remote locations. Here, the Hover Hawk had the advantage of passing seamlessly over water and ice. Two of Fichtel & Sachs’ Wankel motors powered the hovercraft, and a third engine provided the air cushion for the required buoyancy.
The grey Citroën M35 prototype was an important milestone for the company: it was a testbed for the Wankel engine developed by Comotor, a joint subsidiary of NSU and Citroën, and for Citroën’s hydrodynamic suspension with height adjustment.
CROCO Wankel ATV, an all-wheel vehicle intended for military use with potential amphibious applications. However, the project ultimately failed because the Wankel engine could only run on petrol, not diesel.
The corner is occupied by a replica of a Mercedes C111, featuring technological elements from its development, such as the original engine and suspension. The exhibit shown here is the original C 111/1 rotary engine, mounted on the test bench in 1969.
The Mercedes C 111 is our personal favourite, one of the best concept cars of all time. It is not just about the style, mended by a great Italian car designer, Bruno Sacco, who defined Mercedes’ design language for several decades. The C111 also introduced the revolutionary Wankel technology and broke several records. Mercedes-Benz officially unveiled the C-111 over 50 years ago. It was an elegant, futuristic, high-performance sports car in a compact, wedge-shaped body with a three-rotor Wankel engine painted bright orange metallic.
In 2019, Mercedes showcased the entire line-up of concepts, from the SLX to the silver Batmobiles that broke several records, nicely lined up on their magnificent factory stage at the Essen Techno Classica 2019.
The opposite side of the hall hosts a densely parked lineup of Mazda models, with exotics like the original Cosmo, the Eunos Cosmo, a pickup truck and the last generation of RX7. This Mazda fleet is close to the cars we could admire at the Mazda Museum in Germany.
The entrance to the hall is arranged to reflect the office of Felix Wankel, with authentic furnishings.
Bugatti fans will be more than pleased
The last segment is dedicated to Bugatti, with the ground floor featuring an impressive selection of original and replica Bugattis from the prewar period, while the gallery houses a diorama cabinet with miniatures and engines from prewar and postwar Bugattis.
The road car lineup starts strong, with a black Bugatti T57 SC Atlantic, the most cherished and coveted classic car in the world. It was a pinnacle of design and technology of its time, penned by Jean Bugatti.
Since only two specimens were built in 1937, the original vehicles are among the most expensive classic cars in the world. The now-black-painted Atlantic is owned by the fashion designer Ralph Lauren. The former “Rothschild” vehicle is now owned by the Mullin Museum in the US. The exhibited car was created with the technical support of Erik Koux.
The light blue T57 S Roadster is a replica of a one-off show car that never went into series production. Its most striking feature, the extravagant wheel racks, proved impractical due to steering issues and a lack of brake cooling. Nevertheless, it is considered to be the first design specifically built for car exhibitions. The concrete vehicle in the exhibition is a recreation built under the auspices of the Autovision museum, since the original went missing.
The museum never stops impressing, as the next exhibit is another iconic car of the brand: the Type T57 G Le Mans. What Ettore Bugatti never achieved, his son Jean did with this world’s first aerodynamic streamlined car: a victory at Le Mans in 1937. Unfortunately, two years after the Le Mans success, this vehicle led Jean Bugatti to his dramatic fate, as he died in T57G during a test trip, allegedly because he had to avoid a drunk cyclist crossing the test track. The vehicle shown here was reconstructed under the direction of the Autovision Museum, as the only surviving specimen is resident at the Simeon Foundation Motorsport Museum in Philadelphia.
A blue Type 57 Bugatti in Corsica McGiller style is another reconstruction on a different original chassis. The museum purchased an aluminium body style Bugatti T57 ‘Corsica’. It was built by Swiss coachbuilder Cäsar Schaffner back in 1968, and the Bugatti ‘la Petite’ was used as a model at the time.
The next car is a fully restored 1938 Gangloff coupé, originally ordered by the Shakespeare family in New York, that found its way to French textile industrialist and Bugatti collector Fritz Schlumpf. After the death of the Schlumpf brothers, it was sent overseas to the Mullin Museum, along with a number of unrestored Bugattis. These cars formed the ‘Museum’s Schlumpf Reserve Collection’ temporary exhibition for a long time, until the coupé was shipped back in a container to the AUTOVISION museum for complete restoration.
The other side featured a series of restored Bugattis, including a red/black Cabriolet (rare 3-Position Drop Head convertible version) with a Gangloff Colmar body (Series 1, built in 1934, T57132, with Engine No. 161. Next up is a yellow Galibier with a glass roof (Visibilitè), built at the Bugatti factory’s own body shop (Series 2, built in 1936, T57415, Engine No. 313 and an Atalante (coachbuilt at Gangloff, a Series 3, built in 1938, T57720, Engine No. 509. This latter one was originally delivered in 1938 as a Ventoux coupé, but rebuilt with an original Atalante body when acquired by Autovision.
The gallery above features a series of Bugatti engines, each accompanied by a small-scale model for illustration. There is also a Bugatti-themed cabinet with small-scale models and dioramas.
The end of the gallery hosts a selection of 19th-century cars, starting with an 1881 Ayrton & Perry, the very first electric car in history.
The 1883 De Dion & Bouton is the world’s first steam car. French mechanics Georges Bouton and Charles-Armand Trépardoux developed a compact, safe, and rapidly heatable boiler that was universally usable, with the financial support of Count de Dion. The trio entered into a partnership to produce the technology and the vehicles, which eventually gave rise to the legendary De Dion, Bouton & Trépardoux company.
The famous 1886 Carl Benz Patentwagen is the world’s first petrol car.
The 1889 Stahlradwagen (“steel-wheeled car”) was developed by Gottlieb Daimler, and is credited as the world’s first gasoline four-wheeled car.
Finally, the 1893 Benz car is the world’s first series-production car, remaining in production until 1901.
Days of the future past
The floor under the Bugattis and Wankel cars is dedicated to the future. Well, the future at a given time, as it features even legends from the 19th century, like the electric Jamais Contente, the first car to break the 100 kmph speed barrier already in 1899. The torpedo on wheels was equipped with two 25 kW electric motors, each driving the rear axle via a chain drive. The chassis seemed super aerodynamic, except for the poor driver hanging out from the waist. We met a Jamais Contente pretty much every year, which begs the question: how many replicas can be around?
Apart from this highlight, the exhibition features dozens of exciting exhibits from the 19th century (like the Detroit Electric next to the Jamais Contente) to fairly recent car show demo cutouts.
Since its opening in 2002, the museum has showcased the possibilities of future mobility. This exhibition showcases what transportation of tomorrow might look like, thanks to the constantly evolving vehicle concepts loaned to the Autovision Museum by the automotive industry.
There is a stage dedicated to alternative fuels and engines, showing the suitability for everyday use as well as experimental developments around the internal combustion engine.
There are segments featuring hybrid technology (with the groundbreaking Prius and the early Honda Insight) and hydrogen fuel-cell cars (like the Audi h-tron concept and the Hyundai ix35), as well as battery-electric technology.
We spent merely two hours at Autovision, but the museum offers so much more. The exhibits with ample descriptions offer hours of quality time. We also got to meet the owner, who shared many exciting stories about the cars in his collection.
