German Car Zone

Speech by Johan de Nysschen, Executive Vice President of Audi of America at the National Press Club

...In the U.S., it seems to me that whenever I find myself introducing who I am and what company I work for, it doesn’t take very long before the subject of Lexus enters the conversation. From this I can begin to assume that many Americans like Lexus.

Many might consider (Lexus) to be the benchmark in terms of sales volumes. Certainly many people judge success on sales volumes alone. It’s not that I agree that this is “the benchmark”, but let us agree for the sake of the argument and accept Lexus to be the benchmark against which the success of a luxury brand is to be evaluated.

I’d like to compare Audi to Lexus. Lexus entered the U.S. market in the late 1980’s. By 1993, when Audi sales in the U.S. hit bottom at about 12,500 units that year, after the scare here, which was caused by the CBS “60 Minutes” program.

I don’t know how many of you recall that program about apparently Audis having a mind of their own, taking off without being prompted to do so. This was, at the end of the day, proven to be entirely false, but not after virtually bankrupting our company.

It seems to me that in this wonderful country, and by the way I have my green card and plan to settle here forever… in this wonderful country, where you have complete freedom of expression, it seems to me it’s not right that we should have been so damaged by something that was so malicious and unfounded. But, that’s the real world, it’s a tough place, and we live to fight another day.

So by the end of 1993, Audi was on its knees. Our good friends at Lexus had brought their sales volume already to 95,000 cars. Over the next years, Lexus would grow their sales in the U.S. to over 300,000 cars. Audi has recovered to around 85-86,000 units.

Now, I could be depressed about this and say, “Gee, look how well Lexus has done, and I wish that we could have done the same.”

This question was brought home to me rather forcefully a few weeks ago by a New York journalist who said to me, “Hey, Lexus sells over 300,000 cars and you sell only 85,000. To what do you ascribe Audi’s failure?”

That’s like asking “Do you still beat your wife?”

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Full Interview: http://www.fourtitude.com/news/publi...cle_2705.shtml