Somewhere in the hinterland of Ingolstadt, a blue-collar worker is nursing a bruised ego. After much investigation, this benighted wretch was pinned down as the cause of power steering malfunctions in an important new Audi model on the far side of the world.

For those who came in late, Audi's Q5 suffered three power steering failures during the local media's drive program back in March (more here). During a Q&A session following the presentation of two new Q5 variants (more here), Audi's local MD, Joerg Hofmann, was asked for an update on the situation.

"The so-called power steering failures... were related to 3.0-litre TDI cars with dynamic steering," Hofmann explained.

"There were some investigations done. What was found out... was it was a leak out of the hose, which obviously led to that dynamic steering [fault]. It was just a simple process issue.

"Our cars were test-driven 100,000km around the world -- and then you have three cars in Australia all of a sudden have something happens which should never happen.

"So of course it caused a few waves and was investigated back and forth. It appeared that we were the only market in the world that had the problem, due to just a process issue on the assembly line.

"Obviously somewhere down the line [during] the development process of the car, there was a decision [made] that a certain modified hose needs to be used. For some other reason, at the early stage of the Australian production -- in simple terms -- there must have been a box of old hoses somewhere on the assembly line and human error... They used the old hose instead of the modified hoses. And basically it was a simple process issue on the assembly line.

"It was just early production cars... because early production cars are always the ones use for a launch. As silly as it is... that's how it is. Some unfortunate person must have used an old box of hoses..."

It's a problem Audi would have preferred not to see happen at the onset of local sales for the Q5 -- an important model for the brand in Australia -- but it says much for the build quality of modern cars that this was a consequence of exceptional circumstances, rather than the norm.

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