Junkyard Find: 1990 Audi 100 Quattro Sedan

by Murilee Martin

January 6th, 2016 8:00 AM

junkyard find 1990 audi 100 quattro sedan

The C3 Audi 100 was sold in the United States badged as an Audi 5000 … until the “unintended acceleration” nightmare nearly killed Audi in North America and the company decided, after a few years of abysmal sales numbers, to go ahead and call this car the 100 over here. Because so few were sold, the 1989-1990 Audi 100s are very, very rare these days.

Here’s one that I spotted in a Denver-area yard a couple of weeks back.

This is a manual-transmission car, and the Unintended Acceleration fiasco was all about the automatic-equipped 5000s. That means you won’t see the big scary “Apply foot brake when engaging Drive or Reverse” stickers near the shifter on 5-speed cars. Thanks to a bit of help from the Reagan Administration earlier in the decade, Ford was able to use similar stickers to avoid recalling 23 million vehicles that tended to pop into reverse with no driver input.

Nearly 200,000 miles on this car, which is pretty good for a (non-Mercedes-diesel) German car of its era.

This car probably wasn’t in terrible shape when it showed up in the junkyard, but anything that goes wrong with a 25-year-old Audi is going to cost plenty to fix.

#1990 #1990Audi100 #1990s #Audi #Audi100 #Audi5000 #Audi5000UnintendedAcceleration #Denver #DownOnTheJunkyard #Junkyard #Quattro #UnintendedAcceleration #JunkyardFind

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3 of 96 comments

Bocatrip on Jan 06, 2016

Better interiors.. but never forgotten 100LS and 5000. which were are junk.

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Johnster on Jan 07, 2016

When these were new I thought they were so wonderfully new and round, but now they just look kind of conservative and square and boxy.

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- Corey Lewis on Jan 07, 2016
  
  The design is over 30 years old, of course it looks old. Compare it to other things from the early-mid 80's, and you'll see it's aged incredibly well.
  
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