Audi's R8 supercar was hand-built at Neckarsulm and driven by Iron Man
Seventy workers fitted 5,000 parts by hand to build each Audi R8, and ninety-five lasers then checked the finished car in five seconds. The mid-engined two-seater, launched in 2006, became Tony Stark's everyday ride across six Marvel films before production stopped early in 2024.
Its lineage starts with the Le Mans quattro concept, shown at the Geneva and Frankfurt motor shows in 2003, and the road car officially arrived at the Paris show on 30 September 2006. The name caused some confusion, since Audi already had an R8 prototype that won the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Early coupés came with either a 4.2-litre V8 or a 5.2-litre V10, drove all four wheels through quattro, and were the first production cars with full-LED headlamps. Jacky Ickx, six times a Le Mans winner, called it the best-handling road car of its day.
Audi Sport, formerly quattro GmbH, designed and built it on an aluminium space frame at the company's aluminium site in Neckarsulm, a factory refitted for 28 million euros. On a typical day it produced eight to fifteen cars, with a ceiling of 29, and the laser scan confirmed more than 220 dimensions to within a tenth of a millimetre.
A second generation shown at Geneva in 2015 shared its platform with the Lamborghini Huracán, much as the first had drawn on the Gallardo. The manual gearbox and entry V8 disappeared, while an electric e-tron with a 92 kWh battery reached production in tiny numbers, fewer than 100 sold. A 2017 American edition of just 25 cars was the first Audi in the United States with laser high beams. A 2018 refresh raised the base car from 532 to 562 horsepower, and a final GT of 2023, limited to 333 examples, made 620.
On screen, the first-generation car carried Stark through the Iron Man trilogy as a V8 coupé, a V10 Spyder and an e-tron prototype, while later V10 Plus and Spyder models followed him into the Avengers and Spider-Man films.
Source: Audi R8
