Here’s why Tony Stark drove an Audi in the Avengers movie

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  Audi's vehicles have shown up in plenty of movies recently, but this RSQ e-tron concept car was designed just for Spies in Disguise. [credit: Audi ]

One of the more jarring things about movies for the last couple of decades, to me at least, has been the heavy product placement that comes with the price of admission. You know the sort of thing—a shot that needlessly lingers on a beer bottle's label or a car's badge before moving to the actual drama of a scene. Sure, it gets the product in front of the audiences' eyeballs, but it often ruins any suspension of disbelief that was going on at the time. But on Wednesday, Audi gave us a look at the other side of that equation by posting a Q&A with Kai Mensing, its head of international product placement.

Mensing has been in his role for a decade now, during which time we've seen Audis show up in, among other things, Transformers: Age of Extinction as well several Marvel movies and (to my surprise, because I haven't seen them) the various Fifty Shades films.

But the car company has been helping movie makers with cars for a lot longer—Mensing points to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial as the first, which saw an Audi 5000 sedan share a little screen time with the brown wrinkly alien and his young costars. The company also provided a first-generation S8 sedan for what might have been the last truly good car chase movie—John Frankenheimer's Ronin. (Frankenheimer was a true petrolhead and director of 1966's Grand Prix, so the man knew how to film things on four wheels.)

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