The luxury car that everyone wants, is starting to be disliked

It seems fair to say that Porsche is no longer popular, and that indifference and meanness, arrogance, of course, are the reasons that kill it, but it is not the most fatal factor.

Author | Forrest

Edit | Anfield

Title Picture | Jedi Men

"Why did you close the store suddenly, did you withdraw the store and run away?"

Recently, similar issues have appeared on social media from time to time. However, the target of the store closure is not a new Internet celebrity brand that is in danger, but Porsche, which was once "hard to find".

In March this year, some Guangzhou netizens found that the Porsche store in the core business district of Tianhe suddenly closed the door, and the display cars and accessories samples were removed, leaving only two Apple computers that were not taken, messy tables and chairs in the negotiation area, and a simulator for children to experience go-karts.

Some media went to find out the situation and got a short but clear answer: "Porsche has confirmed its withdrawal." ”

At this point, it looks like it's time for the story to come to an abrupt end.

However, sharp-eyed netizens found that the withdrawn store turned out to be Porsche's 100th store in China, and the store even retained a commemorative plaque signed by former Porsche executives, which is very commemorative.

The news of "the 100th Porsche store withdrawal" was quickly ignited on social media, whether it was the car circle or the people who ate melons, netizens obviously realized that this store withdrawal was unusual.

The most cost-effective luxury car brand,

Have you also started to close stores? (Photo/Visual China)

To be honest, if it weren't for the casual slap of netizens, probably the vast majority of Chinese would not have remembered -

Porsche?

You know, on March 11 this year, Porsche just released a new generation of million-dollar pure electric luxury car Taycan in China, and put a lot of advertisements for it, hoping to use this luxury car to impress successful people who are still undecided.

But judging from the sales data, Porsche's calculation seems to be unsatisfactory. According to the financial report data, Porsche's global deliveries in 2023 will be 320,200 vehicles, a year-on-year increase of 3%, but specific to China, Porsche will only deliver 79,300 vehicles for the whole year, a year-on-year decrease of 15%.

China was the only market for Porsche's decline, and the performance caused an uproar in the market – it was expected to fall, but it was expected to fall off a cliff.

You know, in the past eight years, China has been the most profitable market for Porsche, and there is a consensus that "for every three cars sold by Porsche, one is sold to China".

Young "upstarts" who are active in high-end social circles no longer prefer Porsche, and the vagaries of the domestic and foreign car market and social environment may be a reason to comfort themselves, but they certainly don't stop there.

01

China's "no natural enemies" luxury car brand

Car enthusiasts who regard cars as their lives will definitely think of the classic 911 when it comes to Porsche.

It cannot be denied that this supercar, which was born in 1963, won many championships in the Dakar Rally and set lap times in New Zealand, changing the tone of the car with maverick line elements and surging power output, and has become a classic model in the history of automobiles.

As a classic, the Porsche 911

It's always on the movie screen.

(Photo/"Strange Tricks")

But that's just the A-side of Porsche – after all, for the vast majority of people, the classic "Marble" is a "non-desecrated" aura car, and ordinary people can only meet it at major auto shows.

The "B-side" Porsche that really impresses the middle class is the more classic and practical Cayenne and Macan, as well as the "dream car" Panamera (Paramela), which is loved by countless young men and women.

After all, for the wealthier Chinese, the car is a symbol of social status. Especially in the era when the automobile consumer market is just emerging, cars are often equated with face. Like a group of foreign counterparts who came from the "east", Porsche, which was self-assured, also landed early at that time and captured the first batch of new middle class in China.

Back in the spring of 2001, Porsche opened its first Chinese store on Chang'an Avenue in Beijing. Porsche's official website still retains the iconic store photo - the whole store is decorated in a very Chinese style, with red pillars and glazed yellow tiles, supplemented by white marble fences, and the red English letters "PORSCHE" are very conspicuous.

A year later, Porsche unveiled its first Cayenne SUV at the Geneva Motor Show, which instantly ignited the enthusiasm of the Chinese luxury car market, and the few Porsche stores in the country were crowded with successful people from all over the world who came to buy the Cayenne – after all, Chinese consumers clearly prefer practical SUVs to the stylish 911.

A set of data from 2007 shows that Porsche sold 4,179 units in Chinese mainland, of which 84% was contributed by the Cayenne.

Later, Porsche, like a rocket in China, rushed to the altar:

In 2009, Porsche unveiled the four-door luxury sedan Paramela, nearly half of which was sold in China, and ten years later, Porsche delivered a new Macan model that is half cheaper than the Cayenne, making Porsche a unique presence in China's luxury car market. At the craziest time, buying a Porsche requires waiting in line for two years to pick up the car.

Any Porsche model,

In China, it is a hard currency in the automotive industry.

(Photo/Visual China)

Stimulated by the upgrading of production capacity, the average age of those Chinese who look up to Porsche and eventually become Porsche owners has fallen again and again, and has changed from "old money" to "new upstart".

In particular, the four-door luxury sedan Paramela, after being planted by many Internet celebrities, has become a treasure car for young ladies, and has made Chinese car owners the youngest customers of Porsche in the world, with an average age of only 36 years old.

02

Apathy and arrogance,

Let Porsche fall out of favor

It can be said that Porsche was also the Moutai of the automobile circle.

After all, Porsche, which is between luxury and ultra-luxury brands, is not as rich as Ferrari, Bentley, Aston Martin, Maserati or Lotus, but it is also more temperamental and more identical than BBA, which has more than 10 million shares in China and is highly homogeneous.

The "driving machine" in the eyes of veteran car enthusiasts, the "status symbol" recognized by local tyrants, and the "dream car" favored by young women have made Porsche, which has no rival in China, soar all the way. As of 2022, the Chinese market has been Porsche's largest single market in the world for eight consecutive years, accounting for 30% of Porsche's global sales.

On social media, quite a few young women

Treat Paramela as a "treasure car".

(Photo/Screenshot of Xiaohongshu)

But this grand occasion came to an abrupt end in 2023 when life returned to daily life. In the third quarter of that year, Porsche sold only 16,900 vehicles in China, a year-on-year plunge of 40%, which directly caused its performance in the first three quarters to fall by 12%.

In the face of the decline in sales, Michael Kirsch, CEO of Porsche China, in an interview with the media, analyzed three reasons: one is the Cayenne, the most popular model in the Chinese market, and the sales rhythm has not kept up due to the switch between the old and new models; second, the price war in the macro market is extremely fierce; and the third is the allocation of a part of the Chinese market to other markets around the world.

This is obviously just a polite remark to support the scene.

Regarding Porsche, the Internet is full of favors and preferences of "no one can be young forever, but young people will always love Porsche", but there are also black ridicules and sarcasm that "buying a Porsche is like buying a rough house, and it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to decorate it".

Taking Porsche's best-selling Macan as an example, the official guide price of 578,000 yuan for the entry-level model has made a lot of middle-class people with a car purchase budget of less than 600,000 yuan excited.

But after placing an order, prospective car owners found out that the gimmick was really just a gimmick.

The most basic equipment of the Macan vehicle, such as standard paint, wheels, seat layout, surround view assist system, sunroof, seat heating/ventilation, rear air conditioning, etc., all need to be increased in price to match, and one set is already worth spending money on an ordinary family car with decent configuration.

The Porsche that I bought at a huge cost still needs to be spent again

Hundreds of thousands can make up for the configuration in the car,

Of course, the wheels and premium brake pads pictured here are also included.

(Photo/Unsplash)

It sounds ridiculous, but this is exactly the fixed pattern of Porsche selling cars - in the eyes of Porsche fans, a car without an option is no different from a rough house, and few 4S stores will sell a naked car without any options. After all, Porsche, which positions itself as "above luxury and below luxury", is originally a high-level existence.

This can be seen in a few details. In many public occasions, Porsche still speaks in large paragraphs of English to support the scene, giving ordinary people the feeling of inexplicable nobility and alienation.

Previously, it was revealed by the media that Porsche's sales system in the North American market is even on par with Ferrari, "dividing customers into high, medium and low grades, and deciding the model quota according to the grade".

High-profile, mean-spirited, and arrogant have become labels that Porsche can't get rid of. These are not only reflected in the purchase of a car, but also in the after-sales service.

In January last year, a Paramela with a price tag of 124,000 suddenly hung on Porsche's official website, which quickly attracted attention, and more than 500 enthusiastic prospective car owners paid the reservation fee and were eager to "buy the bottom", but only the reservation money returned by the official Porsche was waiting for Porsche.

Subsequently, the mysterious owner of the car who took the lead in copying the bottom spoke on the Internet, denying that "124,000 can take Paramela", and claimed that after canceling the order, he was rumored to be "the first user who has reached an agreement", and Porsche's attitude towards negotiation was particularly arrogant, which once affected his normal life and made the incident even more confusing.

124,000 "ultra-low price",

Let Porsche fall into the whirlpool of public opinion.

(Photo/Weibo @ Caa Hu Kan)

Not to mention the solution to the "allocation reduction incident" that caused a stir in May 2022, Porsche's insincere handling attitude and double standards towards Chinese and foreign car owners have really hammered the arrogance of this luxury brand, and also planted the seeds of its abandonment by China's "old money" and "new upstarts".

03

Porsche can't sell,

Don't just blame new energy

When Porsche handed over the unsatisfactory answer to the market, under the question of Zhihu, "China has become the only declining market for Porsche, what are the main factors affecting this?", a self-described Cayenne owner answered succinctly: "Many companies are not profitable, and they don't need to buy a good car to deduct taxes." ”

The external environment has changed, the wealth in the hands of the "old money" and "new rich" is no longer abundant, and the more luxurious Bentley and Rolls-Royce are falling out of favor, not to mention Porsche, which is positioned as a quasi-luxury product. Data shows that in 2023, Bentley will only sell 3,006 luxury cars in Chinese mainland, a year-on-year decline of 18%, while the more luxurious Rolls-Royce will have a sharp decline of about 25% year-on-year in 2023.

The shrinkage of wealth has affected people's willingness to buy cars to a certain extent. Those "upstarts" who want to decorate themselves with Porsche choose to test downward, preferring to spend money on BBAs with newer styles and more complete configurations, rather than willing to spend on Porsche "rough cars" that have not been replaced for several years.

It is a fact that Porsche's best-selling models, the Paramela and Macan, have not been updated for many years since their introduction.

Porsche's popular Paramela and Macan in China,

It hasn't been updated for six years.

(Photo/Visual China)

When the world's cars are reshuffled and reorganized in the wave of electrification, people's definition of luxury has long changed, and consumers' car buying logic is also changing.

More and more domestic brands have successively conquered the appetite of consumers with more intelligent long-range electric vehicles, and Musk, the "car maniac", uses Tesla to attract owners who drive Range Rover and Porsche Cayenne, and the traditional concept of "what kind of car you drive, what kind of person you are" has been shaken.

In the wave of electrification, Porsche is not reluctant to capture potential customers.

For example, the pure electric luxury car Taycan launched in 2019, Porsche has placed it in the C position more than once in major auto shows, but there are very few people who are really willing to spend more than 1 million for this - not only because of the optional price increase after buying a car, its maximum pure electric range of less than 600 kilometers is not as good as the domestic new energy vehicle priced at about 200,000 yuan.

Porsche can get a brand positioning comparable to luxury,

It is more by technological leadership than by aristocratic blood.

(Photo/Unsplash)

In a sense, Porsche is more like a "flattener" after being carried away by victory and glory.

It is a must-know fact that Porsche has been able to achieve a brand positioning comparable to luxury, more with the speed and passion of the 911, than with the halo of aristocratic blood.

From this point of view, is it true that Porsche, as a status symbol, has been abandoned by consumers?

When wealth rises again, consumers will still identify with Porsche's racing legend and the classic practicality that benefits from technological leadership – but only if the indifferent and arrogant Porsche is willing to put down its lofty attitude and face the increasingly volatile car market and consumers with more and more different tastes.

[1] "Porsche, Falling Off the Altar", Auto Commune, 2024-2-20

[2] "Behind the 124,000 Paramela Buy, It's Still the Arrogant Porsche" Daily Person 2023-2-2

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