ooooIYKYK, ISSUE #0016
Forgive the salacious title. Titles like this seem cringey to me, sounding like a heavy-handed eyebrow-raiser. It pains me even more to ask the question in earnest. Back in January when I was fresh off working for Audi Club North America and preparing to upright this site, I caught a story over on the Autopian by Matt Hardigree. The title “Audi Has Lost the Plot” grabbed my attention as intended, and the concerns raised there by a veteran car journalist were noted. It’s now six months on, and I find myself concerned enough to consider this question more openly.
There are a lot of ways to assess and answer such a question, and in most weeks the answer is mostly debatable. But, this week… it’s a little less open to interpretation.
Regretfully, stories coming out these last few days suggest a bit of a perfect storm pile-on. I was already penning a piece about my own frustrations surrounding Audi’s prioritization (or lack thereof) of Pike’s Peak when the Instagrammer/YouTube Channel known as Auditography had a bit of a Jerry Maquire “mission statement” moment.
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Similar to me, Auditography has been a single brand focused media player specifically around the Audi brand for a few decades. He came to the fore more in the social media platform influencer era and he’s based in Europe, but our trajectories in Audi’s orbit seem to be very similar – a face and a voice for brand aficionados.
The video Auditography produced is over an hour long. It covers a lot of ground. It’s openly critical of the brand, and the online response from the brand’s most loyal following has been consistently in agreement with the criticism. For those inside Audi, these should be red flags… if they’re listening.
But, let’s come back to that.
Numbers First
Let’s begin with data. Audi of America just released its Q2 sales and there’s a lot of red – A3 (-21%), A4 (-96%), A5 (-48%), A6 (-24%), e-tron GT (-64%), Q3 (-2%), Q4 e-tron (-52%), Q4 Sportback e-tron (-49%), Q5 (-29%), Q8 e-tron (-88%).
Beyond the all-new models such as Q6 e-tron and A6 e-tron for which there are no 2024 sales, the only cars in the black were A7 (+90%), plus the recently refreshed Q7 (+32%) and Q8 (+7%).
In fairness to Audi, there are a couple of things going on here worth noting. For starters, the brand is just emerging from a new model glut that means aging product is just finally giving way to fresher replacements. No doubt tariffs have also played a part. Still… these numbers are bad, bad enough that Audi is off 19% for the quarter and 12% for the year on new car sales, while Certified Pre-Owned (CPO) sales of older models are off just -1.3% for the quarter and -3.6% for the year.
Another number that smarts is the brand’s position in the J.D. Power 2025 U.S. Initial Quality Study (IQS) ranking. This study measures problems per 100 vehicles across all brands. Here, Lexus ranks first at 166, the study average is 192 and Audi isn’t just back there… they’re dead last at 269.
This deserves another clarification. Audi has reasoned in the past that they don’t subscribe to jumping through at times trivial hoops in order game the J.D. Power survey as some brands have been known to do. As a result, Audi has consistently scored near the bottom of the list since 2020… but dead last? That’s a headline generator with some bite.
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Auditography Video
The video in question has a run time of 1 hour and 10 minutes. It reportedly took five months to produce. Auditography (I don’t know his real name) has been working in the space 20+ years and owns a collection of Audi models. Like me, and I suspect like most of us reading this, he identifies as a brand enthusiast. Also like the rest of us, that may not make him exactly resemble the desired makeup when Audi marketing executives visualize their target buyer. Still, he’s a brand loyalist who influences his friends and other enthusiasts. Whether Audi, you, or me agree with him, we’d be foolish not to listen. So, I spent an hour taking it all in.
His beefs begin with specific details where he’s most concerned – 15 minutes on the new badging design (placement and substance), then 13 minutes on frustrations with the latest interiors, then more specific details like sunroof, cheap key fobs, fake exhaust tips, soft limiters (i.e. how you can’t rev a modern Audi in neutral). He also gets more macro on exterior design, model naming strategy, killing the icons (i.e. anything sporty or lifestyle with less than four doors), and finally the lack of consideration of the enthusiast.
While the video includes plenty of his usual beauty shots, it deviates from his norm by laying out his frustrations thoroughly. He appropriately quotes a Steve Jobs attributed riff on the importance of product substance that can be lost on marketing and sales personnel, then poetically calls back the original Latin translation of the word “Audi” … i.e. “listen”.
He questions how much the executives at Audi are listening to the brand’s customers… particularly its most loyal enthusiast customers.
Over the years, I’ve asked this question myself. More recently, I’ve found myself asking it with greater regularity… especially when I read comments on social media posts by or about the brand. It seems more and more like Audi representatives who simply don’t understand enthusiasm for the brand wish to pigeon-hole enthusiasts as outliers they must plan around rather than plan to include. If my read is correct, then I find that highly puzzling.
In my experience, the most successful and iconic brands don’t brush off or simply tolerate enthusiasts. On the contrary. They aim to transform all customers into enthusiasts. Shouldn’t they then be curious as to why people care so much about their brand, or why decisions they make douse the passion or brand enthusiasts? And while that seems obvious to me, it’s my experience these last few years that Audi has shifted from a culture that worked hard to breed enthusiasts during the 2000s and 2010s into a culture who simply doesn’t understand aficionados – where response often feels labored, more like token toleration than a celebration of shared affinity.
Where to Go with This
I have been delaying my own work about misgivings I have, most recently embodied by Audi choosing not to show up in any way at Pike’s Peak this year. I didn’t want that work to be a hit piece, and I don’t want to start a pile-on. Airing things out in the open isn’t always productive… but sometimes it’s necessary when there’s no other way to have your voice be heard.
I also have concerns about becoming something for which I’ve always found a bit annoying. Back in 2001, my startup Vortex Media Group had launched the Volvo site Swedespeed. I was new to the Volvo space and surprised to encounter so many self-identifying Volvo brand enthusiasts who were frustrated with the brand – back then traditionalists still hating the arrival of the front-wheel drive era at Volvo years after the transition. Later, I’d experience it again with an older generation of Audi Club members lamenting the passing of the quattro era, then the B5 era. More recently, it’s the resentment of EVs by traditional car enthusiasts, often served with a side of political partisanship.
I’ve never really seen the value of piling on public criticism… even when I authentically have a firm and informed critical perspective. In my experience, that’s a quick way to get written off… particularly when the subject doesn’t wish to hear the critique. Maybe it’s time though.
I’m going to take some time to dig more into these subjects in near-future work on this platform – posts and some podcast-based discussions with various perspectives in the space. I don’t want to pile on and be a crank, but things have gotten worse than I’d feared whether that’s brand decisions I’ve disagreed with or simply a groundswell of unhappiness from enthusiast voices.
I believe it’s time for some productive collaborative discussion. The sales show it. The quality numbers show it. Auditography’s video shows it. The landslide of reaction to his video and almost ubiquitously negative voices on any new Audi model post I see all show it as well. There’s a general sense of frustration with the brand that I don’t think Audi has the luxury of ignoring.
Look for more from me via this platform in the future. For now, watch the Auditography video and weigh in on your thoughts. If you feel you have something to add to this discussion, drop a comment below or shoot me an email george.achorn@ooooIYKYK.com and I’ll do my best to integrate it into the mix.
To those who share the passion, I hear you. I have had an affinity for the Audi brand since I first bugged my grandfather for an R/C ur quattro at Radio Shack, or stood salivating over a Coupe quattro in the showroom at Autohaus Lancaster while my old Scirocco sat in the parking lot. I spent years imagining my cars, then buying and/or building them, launching Fourtitude, covering Le Mans ten times and catching Ferdinand Piëch’s attention, flying home with their executives on a charter flight out of Frankfurt after September 11th, redesigning and building quattro Magazine, or running their largest owner’s club in the world… driving my dad for the final time to the hospital in my family’s e-tron. I’ve felt the love vividly at the highs, and the sadness or frustration at the lows. The four rings are like family to me. I can’t just drop them because my value doesn’t register with this or that executive, or those executives want to make decisions I disagree with. That’s life… but it’s life you don’t run away from.
And to my friends at Audi, I hope you know we do this out of love first for the brand. We may not always agree… again… that’s life. I know there are real heroes inside who also must work within the culture at hand. That culture is always shifting; in ways I perceive are for the better at the moment. Even still, voices need to be heard, and I’ll do my best to communicate these things respectfully.
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