Audi Has Lost The Plot

With the last sales reports flying in there’s finally a clear picture of how this year went for various automakers in the United States. Brands with trucks, affordable crossovers, and/or hybrids did quite well. Brands that are too EV-heavy, saddled with aging lineups, or a bunch of also-ran vehicles suffered the most.

If you’ve read The Morning Dump lately it won’t surprise you to find out that most of the Stellantis brands had a bad year, but Audi’s poor showing might be news. Audi, for whatever reason, has managed to avoid the negative attention. Don’t worry, Audi will get its spotlight today.

Both Ford and GM improved on the year in sales, which might help explain why Ford dealers are feeling better about the brand (Ford walking away from its EV mandates probably also didn’t hurt). Even better, Lincoln had its best year since 2007 thanks to a Chinese import.

The Problem With The Silver Cars

Of all the “mobility company” plays in the last decade that made no sense to me, the one I actually quite liked was Silvercar. Founded in 2015, the Austin-based company had a simple idea: Renting cars is too expensive and complicated, let’s make it easier.

The concept was great. At first, all you could rent was a silver Audi A4 sedan. A perfectly cromulent car, ideal for driving around whatever city you landed in, with just a touch of premium luxury. You could book via an app, with a process way more streamlined than anything you could expect from a rental agency at the time.

Plus, it was “cool” to drive an Audi. The brand had a lot of forward-thinking sports cars and coupes, a genuine supercar, and a prototype race car that absolutely dominated global motorsports. Audi could do no wrong. Then Dieselgate happened, Audi pivoted to EVs, and somewhere along the way, the brand got harder to pin down.

Audi quickly invested in Silvecar, expanded the number of vehicles that were offered, and eventually transitioned the company into “Audi on Demand.” Late last year, Audi ended the program with little explanation. Had Audi overcomplicated the service? Was it just too expensive and time-consuming to run a rental agency? Has Uber/Lyft and the rise of Turo made this service obsolete?

Or, and this is a tougher situation for Audi, is Audi no longer cool? Has it lost its Audi-ness? It’s probably some mix of all of the above, but the lack of coolness is what I’m interested in this morning.

I’m going to start with the numbers, and the numbers aren’t great. You know it’s going to be bad news when you get a year-end sales email from a company and it’s just a link, with little text, and that link just goes to a table. Overall, Audi’s new car sales are down 14% for the year, though that’s off a relatively strong 2023.

Looking at the lineup there’s not a lot of good news. In a year that saw the overall market growing, here are all the Audi vehicles that lost ground in 2024 compared to 2023:

• A3 (-30%)
• A4 (-48%)
• A7 (-13%)
• A8 (-28%)
• e-tron GT (-10%)
• Q5 (-23%)
• Q7 (-28%)
• Q8 e-tron (-27%)
• Q8 e-tron sportback (-33%)
• R8 (-48%)
• TT (-95%)

Some of this is due to discontinuation, with a few leftover Audi TTs skewing the numbers, for instance. In fact, Audi is getting out of the coupe game entirely for now. Still, losing with volume sellers like the Q7 and Q5 hurts. The Q5, in particular, is the most important Audi there is now, effectively replacing the A4 in the lineup. The most successful Audi in 2024 was probably the Audi Q3, which goes to show how important affordability is in the market.

I think the big question that has to be asked is: Why buy an Audi? For a while, the A4 represented a certain tech-forward upper-middle-class professional aesthetic. If you pictured what a young architect might drive in 2010 you’d probably imagine them in a silver Audi A4. In my mind, all those people now drive Tesla Model Ys.

Audi clearly sensed this and built up its electric offerings, selling six different EV models in 2024, and not a single one of them was particularly competitive from a sales perspective. In total, Audi sold fewer than 25,000 electric cars last year, which is about how many Model Ys that Tesla sells every three weeks just in the United States.

Is help on the way? Sure. Audi will get a redesigned, third-gen Q5/Q5 Sportback soon, and that will likely help sales of its key model. The confusion over Audi sedans will be resolved a bit by the introduction of a new Audi S5/A5, a vehicle that our Mercedes recently reviewed and liked. The short-lived Audi RS6 Avant, if not a huge breakout sales success, did bring some much-needed halo energy to the brand.

None of this answers the question: Who is this brand for? Jalopnik had a brutal headline earlier this year when it wrote: “Audi’s Sales Are Flagging Because There’s No Reason To Buy One.” That’s a good joke, though I wouldn’t go that far.

Audi’s CPO sales were up 29.3% year-over-year because, if you make it affordable enough, people still see the value in the Audi brand. This is why I said “lost the plot” in the headline. It’s unclear where Audi is right now based on its mix of products, but all hope is not lost. The four rings still have meaning. There are still enough people alive who remember Jason Statham piloting an Audi in The Transporter, all the Le Mans wins, and Michelle Mouton conquering Pikes Peak.

Right… right?

[Ed Note: I’ll just state that the Audi RS6 Avant remains an extremely cool car in an otherwise somewhat bland lineup. Also, my brother has a bright yellow Audi S3; I drove it recently, and it rules. I also like the E-Tron GT. There’s still some fire in that lineup, but Audi needs more. -DT]. 

What’s The Most Troubled Stellantis Brand?

Just from a numbers perspective, you might think that Dodge was the most doomed brand in the Stellantis stable. Its annual sales dropped 28.9% in 2024 compared to 2023, and it even fell 47.2% in Q4. That’s not great, but Dodge is merely a shadow of itself already.

Maserati sales were down 4% for the year and 27.5% in Q4. Even worse, Maserati’s volume is so low it’s hard to imagine how the brand even sustains itself. My assumption is that Maserati is going to get sold off, so perhaps it can live a better life somewhere else. Maybe Alfa, which has low volume and poor sales is the worst? Fiat grew this year but, again, from extremely low volumes. Chrysler grew in Q4, on the back of a lot of minivans and also old 300s that haven’t been sold.

Ram is a problem. A big problem. Sales dropped 18.6% year-over-year and there’s no real replacement for the Ram Classic in the lineup, though a newly redesigned Ram 1500 should bring some relief to Ram dealers in the coming year.

I’m going to make the argument that Jeep is actually the worse off, because Jeep is where the money is and, like Audi, it’s wandering a bit. The Wagoneer/Grand Wagoneer has not been a success. The Wrangler has a lot of competition and is aging. The entry-level models are fading away and have yet to be replaced. It’s tough. Overall, Jeep sales were only down 8.6% year-over-year, but that represents the loss of a ton of customers and market share (more than losing all Alfa Romeo, Fiat, and Maserati customers).

The new, likely hybrid Jeep Cherokee is something that basically has to work for Jeep, and I’m hopeful the company will pull it off. I don’t have quite the same enthusiasm for the electric Jeep Wagoneer S, but perhaps it’ll do better than my low expectations for it.

Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram Dealers Big Mad, Ford Dealers A Bit Chiller

Ford had a big year, growing a little faster than the overall market thanks to a lot of hybrids, a new F-150, and a surprisingly good showing from Lincoln (more on that in a bit). While EV sales were also big for Ford, the company walked back its plans to make dealers spend a lot of money upgrading facilities to sell and service electric cars and trucks.

Last year, a bunch of recalls and tsuris around the EV requirements led Ford dealers to place the company as the least trusted franchise in the annual report from dealership advisory firm Kerrigan Advisors. There’s a new report out for 2024, and Ford has improved from the least trusted to the fifth-least trusted. While it’s not great to be the fifth least-trusted franchise, the brand is overall trending in the right direction.

Who is going backward? Only 2% of dealers have a “high level of trust” in Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram. That’s worse than all other brands. Perhaps even more damning, a whopping 72% of dealers have “no trust” in the brands, which is way worse than Infiniti at 59% and Nissan at 58%.

Stellantis dealers went to war with then-CEO Carlos Tavares over the lack of competitive product and a squeezing of incentives. The expulsion of Tavares will likely help in this regard, as will the increase in incentive spending, but Stellantis clearly has a long way to go.

The most trusted franchises, if you were curious, are: Toyota, Lexus, Subaru, Honda, and Porsche, in that order.

Lincoln Has, Uh, A Great Year

I drove the Lincoln Nautilus earlier this year and got to try its enormous curved screen and, frankly, I got it. While I do not think of myself as a Lincoln buyer, if someone asked me for a hybrid luxury vehicle that wasn’t a Lexus there’s a lot to be said for getting one of these.

I wasn’t alone in thinking this. Motor Trend’s SUV of the Year‘s sales were up 50.2% year-over-year. The refreshed Aviator also saw a 62.3% increase in sales. Even the Corsair, which has been on sale for what feels like three decades, saw sales increase by 12.8% over the same period.

The only sales decrease was for the Navigator, which was in its last year before a big redesign and experienced a drop of around 11.5%. My sense is that the new Navigator, though expensive, will help turn things around for Lincoln this year.

Does this mean Lincoln, which saw a sales increase of 28.1% overall, is saved? Not quite.

At 104,823 sales, the brand is still smaller than competitors like Acura and, hell, even Chrysler. I’m not sure how many cars the average Lincoln dealer needs to sell for it to be a good business, but there are obviously too many Lincoln dealers for the number of cars being moved (the brand has tried to fix this by getting rid of about 200 dealerships over the last two years).

Even worse, its volume seller, the Nautilus, is a Chinese-built car. While Ford has an out here with a quirk in import laws, increased scrutiny over “connected cars” from China could easily make it harder to sell them over here. Then what?

What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD

I’m kind of surprised to find that this official audio version of “Caribou” from a John Peel Session in 1988 only has 16,000 views. Perhaps Pixies fans are just not listening to music on YouTube? Maybe the eyeball creeped them out a bit?

The Big Question

If you had to buy a new car from Audi, Chrysler, Infiniti, or Lincoln what would you get? Why?