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For Lexus, you are about right, but Audi and BMW sell around six times as many cars as you presume. The most recent sales numbers I could find:

BMW: 2 247 485 in 2015 (source)
Audi: 2 024 881 in 2015 (source)

Audi has built an industrial scale plant that converts renewable gas to chemical energy ( although not liquid) see http://www.audi.com/content/com/brand/en/vorsprung_durch_technik/content/2013/10/energy-turnaround-in-the-tank.html. Actually, if commercially viable, converting electricity back to nautral gas as this plant does is a very bright idea. In Europe we already have infrastructure to transport gas so this seems a good way for storing excess energy.

Well, even the emergency brake on many modern cars is no longer a pure mechanical device. http://www.audi.com/aola/brand... I think that it's safe to say that the manual brake feature is going to require electronic equipment to be functional.

Last I heard Audi hadn't cancelled the A1 E-Tron with a plug-in Wankel, http://www.audi.com/com/brand/en/tools/news/pool/2010/03/audi_a1_e-tron___electric.html "The A1 e-tron concept car has a Wankel engine as a range extender, but other compact concepts are also possible. The small single-rotor Wankel has a chamber volume of 254 cc and runs at a constant 5,000 rpm in its peak efficiency window.".

Actually, german cars (Audi) have already been investigated on sudden unintended acceleration charges in the 1980s.

Turns out it was driver error. Just as with the recent investigation of Toyota.

But you're right. There is still a chance that sudden unintended acceleration will occur because of bugs in the product. Although it probably won't. Probably.

Well the Audi "unintended acceleration" issues were because Americans weren't used to driving fast cars in the 80's. The Toyota problem was that Toyota drivers were unaware that their car HAD an accelerator and mistakenly thought their car had two brake pedals to go even slower than the usual Toyota - thus when they went to slow down to 20 mph in the high speed lane, they pressed the gas pedal, broke 30 mph, shit their pants, and called 911.

Actually, german cars (Audi) have already been investigated on sudden unintended acceleration charges in the 1980s.

Turns out it was driver error. Just as with the recent investigation of Toyota.

But you're right. There is still a chance that sudden unintended acceleration will occur because of bugs in the product. Although it probably won't. Probably.

...re point two - how about this?
http://www.audi.com/audi/com/en1/experience/motors port/Audi_R10_TDI.html
Just won Le Mans, 650BHP...

I guess Audi never got the memo.

Neither did this bank.

I'm sure there are more out there. But I'm not sure you are accurate on this. Check out the International Trademarks Association site for more information found here.

Let me think for a moment... Hell yeah! If we had low power speech processors, the possibilities would be endless. For one, we'd finally have a Star Trek(TM) interface for our homes!

"Computer, lights!"
"Computer, make coffee!"
"Computer, Earl Grey, hot!"

A friend of mine is working at the research department of Audi. And guess what? They have fully functional speech recognition like the one you described.

Okay, no thing like boiling coffee, but a/c and lights control, entering destinations for the navigation system, and controlling the radio and CD player are working perfectly. You even have to start a command with a phrase like "Computer" to attract the computer's attention.

The future has already started :-)

My dad drives an A2, my girlfriend a A-Class and I have a friend who owns a Smart. You can't beat these kind of cars when you mainly do city traffic.

Perhaps BMW will take some design notes from the iPod's controls into the next revision of their iDrive system.

I'm afraid Audi beat them to it.

Audi is one of the world leading inovaters of aluminum framed cars. check them out here Audi.com the A2 and the A8 series' of vehicles are their most remarkable uses of the material.

Audi uses aluminum frames in, i believe, all of their vehicles. most notably in the A8 line of super sedans and their A2 line of sub compacts.

i know audi vw and porsche share alot of similar parts nowadays, so are there any air-cooled audi's you forgot to mention? or is the audi/vw/porsche parts alliance more recent than air-cooled design?

According to Audi's website, Audi became a wholly-owned subsidiary of VW in 1966. However, I never hear of anyone praising the simplicity of the Audi air-cooled engine like I hear of the old Beetle and Micro-Bus engines.

As is audi.com. (Not the USA site.)