I guess it was inevitable. I’d been noticing for a while that Audis were the new bullies on the road. It used to be BMWs, of course. Drivers of the cars from Munich are still doing a pretty good job of trying to shove the rest off the road. But now Audis, also from Bavaria, have joined the bulldozer gang. Showing no road courtesy whatsoever, Audi drivers are riding your bumper, flashing their lights and generally making nuisances of themselves, writes Karl Ludvigsen.
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The new generation of Audi road bullies needed a car design to match, and Audi has given it to them. Now when an Audi is on your tail, you’ll know it. Your mirrors will be filled with a huge toothy grin with four interlocked circles in the middle. There’s no escaping the gaping maw of the new A6 and A8 W12. It’s an in-your-face design that shocks and stuns with its raw boldness.
This is a big departure from the clean, hewn-from-steel approach that Ingolstadt’s designers employed to bring Audi up from a middle-class entry to an executive luxury contender. It’s deliberate, says Audi’s board member for international sales and marketing, Ralph Weyler. ‘This is in line with the brand’s development,’ he said, ‘which is to be sporty, have more presence, a bolder approach. From the quality, product and price perspective we’re at the same level as our competitors, and our customers expect a certain statement. That bold new nose is intended to present Audi in a prouder, more thrusting way.’ With the new grille, he added, Audis ‘are more dynamic, more sporty and have more presence — they are not saying, “Sorry, I’m here,” but “I’m here.”’
I know what he’s getting at. You might call it the ‘impress the valet-parking attendant’ school of design. When one of these silvery-toothed sharks pulls up at the resort portico, it will command attention. In fact Audi has been the last of the mainstream German marques to throw off the shackles of the post-Hitler-war approach to car design, which was to look as inoffensive as possible, lest your neighbour criticise your pretensions to higher status. Grillewise Audis had a bland letterbox with four rings. The character was in the shape of the car, which was uniquely sleek and sheer — an engineer’s car.
That style, said Audi exterior designer Achim Badstübner, ‘is too cold. In the 1990s it was a very rational design for a rational period. But things are more emotional now, and you have to go with the times. We needed to make a very strong statement. BMW has its kidneys; Mercedes has its own grille shape. We wanted much more emotion, and the key was the front end.’ The new design was consistent, said chief designer Walter de’Silva, with the Audi’s architecture: ‘Audis have engines located well forward, but that problem becomes an opportunity, because the cabin moves rearwards. The radiator is an icon on the front of the car.’
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By GlobalDataIt’s an icon, all right, but a plug-ugly one. In this I have the support of British style guru Stephen Bayley, who wrote that ‘it is an artistic catastrophe (which is not, of course, the same as a business mistake). It is not just the gruesome, puckered frontal orifice which gives an inelegant look of theatrical surprise to the face. This is certainly an ill-judged and poorly handled styling device.’ The only hint that it could have looked even worse (hard to imagine) is provided by the front end of Rover’s new V8. Designer Peter Stevens, by the way, was not responsible for the Rover concept or its execution — and it shows.
I’ve long been in favour of the idea of breaking through the bumper line to give more shape and depth to a front-end-design. But did Audi have to do it this way? Granted, it doesn’t have a tradition with the length and depth of Mercedes-Benz or even BMW. The modern Audi brand only dates from 1965, when it was revived to give more upmarket appeal to a DKW with a four-stroke engine when the company was owned by Daimler-Benz. Sadly DKW, a respected marque in the small-car field, survived only one more year.
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Audi 1937 |
Nevertheless some of the biggest and best pre-war Audis had a grille design of some distinction, as the accompanying photo shows. Surely this handsome grille shape could have provided da’Silva, Badstübner and company with a concept worthy of extrapolation into a design that could have achieved their aims with considerable flair and the emotion that is all-important these days. They missed an opportunity big time.
But, as Stephen Bayley says, an ugly front end is not necessarily a poor business decision. It does get you noticed, and that’s no bad thing. So how is Audi doing? Not so well. Through the first ten months it has 3.75% of the European market, down from 3.86% a year ago. The BMW brand has roared by it, rising from 3.50% last year to a 3.85% share so far this year. Meanwhile Mercedes-Benz has been declining in Europe from 5.13% a year ago to 4.73% this year.
Nor is America looking very good for Audi. Last year its sales in the USA were 86,421 units. Through October this year it sold only 63,388 cars, down 9.7 percent year-on-year. Americans haven’t yet felt the full impact of the new-look A6, which only hit the market in November. With lots more models coming, Audi’s medium-term aim is sales of 180-200,000 cars a year in America by 2008. That’s a tall order, with or without an ugly front end.
Just to make matters worse, Audi of America Inc. has lost the chief of its American arm in a notorious incident. Axel Mees, a former BMW man, was fired for his remarks about VW’s Phaeton at the San Francisco launch of the A6. Responding to journalists’ comments about the Phaeton’s poor USA sales (some 1,500 instead of the expected 5,000 this year), Mees volunteered the view that ‘Volkswagen underestimated the weakness of their brand in the luxury segment. I think that they realise that the Phaeton — I wouldn’t say it was a failure — was a step too fast in a direction that they wanted to go.’
Rightly, I believe, Mees pointed to the shortcomings of a sales network that wasn’t geared to sell cars at the top of the market. ‘The Volkswagen organisation, from my perspective, is not ready to sell successfully cars in that price range,’ he told 50 attentive reporters. ‘It could be the best car, but I would still not buy it because it has the VW logo and because I have to go to a VW dealership where the salesmen are used to selling Jetts and Golfs.’ This is indeed a high hurdle, one of the main reasons why such brands as Lexus and Infinity have been created.
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Audi A6 4.2 quattro front 2004 |
Folks in Wolfsburg and Ingolstadt were listening, and they didn’t like what they heard. Not for nothing does ‘Audi’ mean ‘listen’ in Latin. The brand name was created by August Horch, whose name means ‘listen’ in German, after he’d left the Horch company in the hands of others. Thanks to good listeners in Germany, Axel Mees was shown the door only nine days after his critical comments. Many have attributed the firing to the anger of Ferdinand Piëch, creator of the Phaeton and its radical factory, who sits on the supervisory board of the VW Group. Piëch, some say, didn’t like his creation criticised. But Mees could just as easily have offended his ultimate boss, Audi chief Martin Winterkorn.
Last year Winterkorn staunchly, and with logic, defended the decision to build the Phaeton. ‘When we at Audi presented the first V8 15 years ago,’ he said, ‘many here at Ingolstadt were deeply worried. The V8 will be our ruin, they said. Now I ask you, where would Audi be today without the V8? And in ten years I’ll ask you, where would VW be without the Phaeton and Touareg? Just one company among many. Look at those car producers who have no models in the top class. What’s become of them? A brand that gives up at the top loses out.’ Here was a clear reference to Ford and Opel, both of which have given up at the top — and are struggling.
When it comes to the V8, Martin Winterkorn has a point. The aluminium A8 has wrought for Audi a ranking among the greats. In 2003 it was the surprise winner when the readers of auto motor und sport in Germany voted on their favourite luxury cars. In 2004 it hugely increased its advantage, taking more than a third of the votes in its class and more than double those awarded to the next-ranked model, the Mercedes-Benz S-Class. Adding a W12 to the A8 range can’t have hurt the reputation of this range-topping automobile.
Speaking of the A8 W12 quattro, it is one staggering automobile. The other day I had a chance to drive one hard at a proving ground. It met every challenge I could throw at it with disarming insouciance, as if to say, ‘Is that the most you can demand of me?’ It was utterly awesome, with a colossal envelope of capability in all directions. At the same time it was silent and smooth with a magnificent interior. When I returned the W12 to its custodian I said, ‘It’s hugely reassuring in this day and age to know that when people spend a lot of money for a car like this, they really get their money’s worth.’ And if you see one coming up behind you, you’ll know to get out of the way.
Karl Ludvigsen
Karl Ludvigsen is an award-winning author, historian and consultant who has worked in senior positions for GM, Fiat and Ford. In the 1980s and 1990s he ran the London-based motor-industry management consultancy, Ludvigsen Associates. He is currently an independent consultant and the author of more than three dozen books about cars and the motor industry, including Creating the Customer-Driven Car Company.
