Audi confident of a sales turnaround

Audi Australia is confident a raft of new models and improved supply will reverse the brand’s local sales dip over the coming years.

Speaking to carsales at the Q6 e-tron media event in Sydney last week, Audi Australia director Jeff Mannering said the 2024 sales hit had been forecast by the brand on account of the myriad generational changes being made at a factory level and that things would improve shortly.

“I knew we were going to go down this year because we had the change over,” he said.

“All the production lines are now shifting to the new models. So they had production breaks.

“That’s why we had no cars for probably five months, so we didn’t have a lot of production.”

He added that Audi holding a smaller inventory locally was not such a bad thing, given the cooling in the market generally.

“If you look at the market in general, there’s a lot of stock sitting out in the in the ports, so we’re not in a bad situation.”

Things aren’t expected to get too much better in 2025 seeing as the new products will be arriving gradually between now and the end of 2026 as opposed to all in one hit, however word is Aussies won’t need to wait as long to see the new models in local showrooms compared to years done by.

“One of the issues with the overseas region, not just Australia, was that we were a little bit behind Europe in the model launches,” Mannering said.

“So they would launch in Europe, and then maybe one year or two years later, we would get the cars in the different markets.

“Now this car (SQ/S6 e-tron) is probably the first car where it’s only about four or five months behind Europe.”

Audi has a rush of product arriving in the next two years, starting with the Q4 e-tron in December, the Q6/SQ6 e-tron in February next year, followed by the third-generation Audi Q5 in April, as well as the A5/S5.

“So we’ll have the freshest model line-up in the market progressively over the next 18 to 24 months, that’s going to be good for us,” Mannering added.

According to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries’ VFacts data, Audi’s peak sales achievement in the last 10 years was 2016 when it sold 24,258 vehicles, but since then they have fluctuated significantly – and like their German competitors, sales have declined overall.

In 2019, 15,708 Audis were pushed out the door, and while last year sales bounced back up to 19,039 units, this year so far it is already down 20.5 per cent year to date.

With 12,364 sales so far this year ending October, Audi is behind German competitors BMW (21,661) and Mercedes-Benz (16,782) and is tracking towards a 15,000 or so annual total for 2024.

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