Written by | Song Yuting
It is said that the post-90s generation is the strongest broken "volume" people, do not follow the tide in work, and have the courage to pay for love in life.
When this group of people gradually becomes the main consumer force in the automobile market, the high-profile tone and service attitude of the brand often cause controversy, and new technologies and smarter have become the most popular consumption concepts, and this transformation has impacted traditional luxury brands.
On January 28, the association released luxury car sales data showing that the cumulative sales of all luxury brand cars in the Chinese market in 2021 were 2.6521 million units, an increase of 4.9% year-on-year.
Although the luxury car market as a whole grew positively last year, most of the subdivisions into specific luxury brands were negative or slightly grown, and many of the credits for the overall positive growth should be attributed to the rapid growth of sales of new energy brands such as Tesla and Weilai.
According to the official data of the Association of Automobiles and various brands, in the more well-known traditional luxury brand BBA, Audi, which entered China, is losing its advantage, and compared with Mercedes-Benz and BMW, its market share gap is being widened.
For the whole year of 2021, bmw alone achieved positive year-on-year sales growth in China, with a total of 846,000 vehicles sold, while Mercedes-Benz and Audi sold 759,000 and 701,000 vehicles respectively, an increase of -2% and -3.6% year-on-year.
In fact, last year, the industry's widespread "lack of core" problem led to insufficient production capacity, resulting in a situation of no car in the city, and among the three BBA companies, Audi was most affected by the "lack of core", which faced various pressures such as cost, management, and operation under the influence of chip shortages and supply chain ruptures.
Not only that, because the Chinese auto market has turned into an incremental market in recent years, Audi dealers have also had to rely on more preferential policies to grab market share, disrupting the rhythm.
Therefore, in the 2021 luxury brand car sales data of the Association of Automobiles, even if three of Audi's models enter the top ten of the sales list, in addition to the Q5 year-on-year increase of 3.3%, A6 and A4 are negative growth.
Among them, the Second Place Audi A6 sold 154,388 units for the year, down 13.5% year-on-year; audi Q5, ranked fourth, sold 149,384 units, an increase of 3.3% year-on-year; and the Audi A4 in the ninth place sold 130,263 units, down 0.5% year-on-year.
In addition, the Audi Q7 is also gradually "falling behind" in the medium and large SUV camp. According to the data, the Audi Q7 sold 16273 vehicles in 2021, ranking behind the BMW X5, Lexus RX, Mercedes-Benz GLE and Volvo XC90 in the list of imported luxury SUV sales.
But more critically, in the era of new energy, Audi's electrification transformation progress has also encountered bottlenecks, and Audi's vehicle quality control has declined in recent years, affecting user purchase decisions.
It is undeniable that the domestic electric vehicle market will rise all the way in 2021, the total sales volume of the market, penetration rate and other indicators continue to hit new highs, many brands take the spring wind of new energy headwinds to overturn, and the industry's prediction of the new energy market in the next 5 years is also quite optimistic.
Unfortunately, the Audi e-tron, e-tron Sprotback and the Q2L e-tron with a range of only 265km are difficult to say successful, and the Audi e-tron only sells 1564 units in the whole year, far less than the Mercedes-Benz EQC and Hongqi E-HS9. Basically missing the "golden five years" of electrification, we can only focus on the next five years.
However, in today's electric vehicle market, in addition to the competition of old rivals such as Mercedes-Benz and BMW, the good strength of new forces such as Tesla and Wei Xiaoli in electrification, networking, and intelligence cannot be ignored.
At the same time, complaints about the quality problems of Audi's hot models in 2021 can be seen everywhere in automotive forums and third-party complaint platforms, and recall plans will be released every few months.
On January 27, 2022, the first month of the new year, the State Administration for Market Regulation issued a recall announcement showing that FAW-Volkswagen will recall some imported and domestically produced Audi vehicles from February 28, 2022. Among them, there are as many as 453791 domestic Audi Q5L involving production dates from March 1, 2018 to December 4, 2021.
According to the announcement, the reasons for the recall are related to the design defects of the vehicle.
Vehicles involved in the recall because the gateway control module is located in a lower position under the rear seats, if a large amount of liquid accidentally spilled on the rear seat, it may cause a short circuit inside the gateway control module, resulting in the transmission clutch will be disconnected, resulting in power interruption during the vehicle, increasing the possibility of accidents, there is a safety hazard.
It is worth noting that the recall was carried out under the circumstance that the State Administration for Market Regulation launched a defect investigation. Affected by the investigation, FAW-Volkswagen AG decided to take recall measures to eliminate the safety hazard.
For Audi today, the automotive market is full of uncertainties, and for the future of Audi, although its MEB platform and e-tron series have emerged one after another, audi may be expected to usher in a turning point after the arrival of Q4 e-tron and more new products.
However, the development of China's auto market to the present, the pattern has gradually stabilized, in the differentiation space reduction, innovation in the current situation, not only Audi, the ambition of the head brands are fully revealed.
The first-line colleagues, Ma launched a new i-series electric vehicle, Mercedes-Benz released the EQ series; the second-line brothers, Volvo, Jaguar Land Rover and even Lexus have also released plans for the full electrification of the brand.
To be sure, a new round of shuffling has arrived, and there is not much time and space left for Audi. 【iDailycar】
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