GAC Acura released the news: From 2023, GAC Honda will no longer produce and sell the existing products of the GAC Acura brand, and THE relevant channels of GAC Honda will continue to provide honorable services for GAC Acura car owners, always protecting the rights and interests of car owners.
This means that from 2023, Acura, a high-end brand of Honda Automobile, will officially withdraw from the Chinese market.
In fact, Acura has been in a state of obscurity in the domestic market for more than ten years. In 2017, Acura sold 16,300 vehicles in China, the peak of Acura since it entered China.
By 2021, Acura would sell only 6,539 vehicles a year, making it the bleakest Japanese luxury brand in China.
Acura's withdrawal from China has also long been rumored. As early as early March this year, there were media reports that Acura's only 4S store in Beijing, "GAC Acura Beijing Jingang Store", had stopped selling, and THE GAC Acura factory had also stopped production.
In order to digest inventory, some dealers have begun to sell cars at a sharp price reduction. According to the understanding of Che300 used cars, Acura CDX and RDX have the highest price reduction range of 60,000 and 70,000 in the terminal, and the lowest price in the country is as low as 169,800 and 258,000 respectively.
Started with a loss
Acura entered the Chinese market is not too late, as early as 2006, Acura announced to enter the domestic market, and through the import of the way to introduce ILX, TLX, RLX three cars and RDX, MDX, ZDX three SUVs, but the presence of these models has been very low.
After that, it also introduced one of Japan's national treasure-class sports cars, acura NSX, the old NSX in driving control is even no less than the 8-cylinder Ferrari, but due to the high price of nearly 3 million plus the low brand influence, the price reduction of the NSX car was as high as 1 million, and still no one car was interested.
In 2016, Acura achieved domestic production, but did not domestically produce its well-known global models, but first launched a "special car" - CDX. Due to its low popularity, Acura has not opened the domestic market.
After the CDX defeat, Acura launched its second SUV model Acura RDX in 2018, which is significantly higher than Acura CDX, and its overseas sales performance is also outstanding, and it was once the sales king in the North American market segment.
However, due to the missed best period of the rapid rise of the luxury SUV market, coupled with the dismal sales of Acura CDX affected the brand image, so the sales volume of RDX after domestic production is still not good, and the development after Acura is also very bumpy.
The development is slow, and it is helpless to delist
Acura has been in China for sixteen years, but now it has fallen into the embarrassing situation of withdrawing from the Chinese market, in the eyes of Che 300 used cars, there are three main reasons.
The first is the lack of brand power. Acura is mainly aimed at the North American market, very popular in the local area, and in the domestic more Buddhist system, although the time to enter the domestic market is not short, but there has been no large and powerful marketing initiatives, so that many consumers do not understand the brand.
Therefore, although it is a second-tier luxury brand, in terms of brand awareness and appeal, Acura is far less than Lexus, which entered the country only two years earlier.
Secondly, Acura's product strength is not balanced enough, and the model update is quite slow. Since 2016, Acura has only launched 3 domestic models of CDX, TLX-L, and RDX, and its models have not been changed or replaced for several years, which has also made it more marginalized.
The same is true for imported models, in 2020, the fourth generation of acura MDX models in the overseas market has begun to see the beginning, but the domestic sales are still somewhat old 2017 models, and the guidance price is as high as 698-848 thousand.
Third, Acura's sales channels have always had the problem of small quantity and uneven geographical distribution. There is even a situation where the Honda brand and the Acura brand are sold on the grid, which leads to the disadvantages that consumers may have inconvenient maintenance and repair after purchasing Acura's models.
Due to various reasons, Acura's long-term poor sales, coupled with Guangqi Honda's hope to accelerate the electrification transformation through resource integration, Acura's withdrawal from China is a helpless move.