In the luxury camp, Audi is the most controversial.
From a global perspective, Audi is a full-fledged luxury brand, whether it is design, heritage, price, user group portrait, Audi worldwide, the target group is definitely not ordinary wage earners.
For example, in the European market, 50,000 euros of Audi abound, and in the European domestic market, the group of users who can spend 50,000 euros to buy a car is very small.
At least from the perspective of pricing and user group portraits, Audi is a full-fledged luxury brand.
Why is it that when it comes to the domestic market, Audi's public opinion is completely different?
01 Cyclical changes
Luxury brands have always been feng shui turns, Audi is not without brilliance, before 2018, or before the era of short videos, no one will deny, no one dares to deny Audi's luxury brand attributes.
Short video is a hype concept, eye-catching tool, singing the opposite can harvest bottomless traffic and fans.
Coincidentally, in the past 5 years, Audi brand products have entered a weak period, and many models have no iteration plan, and Audi A4L, Audi A6L, Audi Q7 and Audi Q5L have not been modified for a long time.
Compared with Mercedes-Benz and BMW, which are frequently moving, Audi's competitiveness in the consumer market is bound to decline.
In order to stabilize market share, in order to make channels, factories and supply chains operate normally, FAW Audi, as a part of a state-owned enterprise, has become a must to abandon profits for market share.
This is social responsibility.
But if we push the historical roller back to 10 years ago, around 2013 is the weak period of Mercedes-Benz, C-class, E-class and other models market discounts are also very large, mainly because the product itself is weak, the E-class of that year does not have core competitiveness in front of A6L.
In the late stage of the sixth-generation BMW 3 Series, the price was also reduced to less than 240,000, and the Audi A4L in the same period was extremely strong, and it was also the first echelon choice in the budget.
BBA's previous name was ABB, because Audi has strong sales capabilities, and the user group behind it is quite strong, especially A6L, which was definitely the product with the strongest user consumption power among the 400,000-level products that year.
02 Seek stability and price reduction
At present, all Audi models have discounts of more than 20%.
The entry price of the Audi A4L is less than 260,000, the price of a naked car is about 240,000, and the price of a naked car of the 40TFSI version of the Audi A6L can also be about 330,000.
The price of Q5L, Q7 and even A5 and A7L is very crazy, and the price of the electrified e-tron series has collapsed even more terrible, and the price of higher-cost EV pure electric vehicles is lower than that of fuel vehicles of the same series.
As we mentioned before, Audi products have lacked core competitiveness in the end market, and the competition in the luxury car market is very terrifying.
In addition to the active facelifts of many models of Mercedes-Benz and BMW, the prices of second-tier luxury brands are very daring, such as the landing price of S90 and XFL has been able to achieve about 300,000.
Although the second-tier luxury brand is not as appealing as BBA, the advantages in products are very large, for example, compared with S90 and high-end A4L, in addition to the brand is not as good as Audi, S90 can be crushed in products.
Ultimately, Audi is in dire need of a facelift.
In the past few years, Audi in the Chinese market has suffered serious internal losses in the North-South dispute, and the Volkswagen Group invested in Jiangqi Group and FAW Audi to set up sales companies to turn positive and transfer to Hangzhou.
Moreover, Audi does lack fresh blood in the global architecture layout, this year 5 series, E-class will be remodeled, and Audi A6L is still not moving, which is a huge pressure for next year's Audi, after all, today's Audi has given a "100,000 discount" policy.
Luxury users care more about the product than the price.
At present, A4L lacks competitiveness in the C and 3 series, and the cheaper A6L in the future is even more backward in the face of the new 5 series and E class, and the market weakness of Q5L and Q7 will continue to increase.
Price reduction is only a short-term way for luxury brands to seek volume, but it will definitely overdraft the brand value, and in the long run, new brand images, new technologies, and new products must appear in time.
Of course, we still do not deny the attributes of the Audi luxury brand, but the objective fact in front of us is that the weakening of Audi's premium power, the weakening of user spending power, and the crazy plunder of Mercedes-Benz and BMW are also indisputable objective facts.