NSU Ro 80

The NSU Ro 80 is one of 20 NSU Motorenwerke models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1967. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the NSU Ro 80 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1960s were the decade of the pony car, the mid-engined revolution and the birth of the modern hot hatchback's ancestors — engineering advanced faster than in any decade before it. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Pontiac Pontiac Firebird, the Toyota Toyota Hilux, the Alfa Romeo Alfa Romeo Spider — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the NSU Ro 80 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 497,5cc x 2 - two-rotor Wankel engine, 115 PS; kerb weight is recorded at 2759 -; drive goes through 3-speed Fichtel & Sachs all-synchromesh manual connected with automatic clutch and F & S torque converter; the layout is FF layout. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the NSU Motorenwerke story

Within NSU Motorenwerke's own catalogue the NSU Ro 80 sits alongside the NSU 10/30 hp, the NSU 1000, the NSU 5/15 PS, the NSU 6/18 hp. The record names the successor = Audi 100 (C2) as its predecessor and the Audi 100 (C2) as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Claus Luthe. Assembly is recorded at West Germany: Neckarsulm.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the NSU Ro 80 costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.