Making a prestige German car calls for attention to detail, so Audi will now only select leather from bulls rather than cows to achieve the required upholstery standards for its cars equipped with leather seats.
Many Audi customers specify leather thanks to the company's high quality interiors achieved with soft and supple leather sourced only from bulls. Hides from cows are too small, less homogenous and do not meet their stringent quality standards.
The standards start from when Audi selects its materials. Each hide is divided into three quality zones. The best piece is the back area (croupon) where the grain is particularly even, with cracks or scars due to injuries rare. Audi discards the outermost region of each hide for quality control reasons.
The very high grade leather from the core of the bull's back is used in all areas of a car seat where fine, smooth appearance and robustness are most important - on the headrest, in the shoulder area, in the important lower seat squab area, side bolsters and seatbacks on the entry side.What's more, Audi also ensures the hides smell nice once installed. Audi's Nose Team was formed in 1985 to combat potentially offensive aromas inside its cars. The six-member Nose Team cuts small pieces of the materials to be tested - for example, wood inlays and the leather upholstery used for the seats.
Leather specimens are each placed in a canning jar equipped with an odorless gasket. An oven heats the sealed jar to 80˚C for two hours. Each tester briefly sniffs the contents of the jar, reseals it and passes it to his or her colleague, grading the scent as they go.
The Audi Nose Team also examines components such as dashboards and also a car in its entirety. The "professional sniffers", who analyze approximately 500 different components in the passenger compartment for each model, are chosen by virtue of their particularly sensitive noses. Smoking is prohibited for these valued experts, while a cold, for example, can stop a team member from working. They also must not give off any scents of their own during testing - whether it be perfume, shower gel, after shave or even garlic.
In a pioneering move for the World's car industry, Audi stopped using chromium salts for tanning hides 15 years ago. The multiple stage leather tanning process is followed by 45 tests to determine the durability of the leather. Samples are mounted in automatic fixtures, which determine it they expand evenly, where they begin to tear, when they begin to develop wrinkles and how resistant they are to abrasion and fire.