All Grown Up: Audi celebrates 20th birthday of TDI
Audi A3 TDI – Click above for high-res image gallery
As Audi begins to roll out the A3 TDI to its U.S. dealers in the coming weeks and the diesel version of the Q7 takes an ever larger share of sales, it’s time to celebrate. This Fall marks the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the first ever TDI engine. TDI, for the uninitiated, stands for turbocharged-direct-injection, and refers to modern diesel engines from the Volkswagen group. Today’s TDI technology has evolved from the 20 year-old 2.5-liter five-cylinder in the Audi 100.
Back then, the first TDI engines retained distributor type injector pumps, although the fuel was sprayed directly into the combustion chambers rather than a pre-chamber. Later, the company used something called Pumpe D
