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Genesis cars win accolades, offer value — so why are sales so bad?

My high-school buddy Brent Cormier was so smitten with the Genesis G80 when he saw it at an event I hosted at SXSW in 2016 he bought a used 2013 Hyundai Genesis a short time later and fell in love with the car. "It surpasses my every expectation," said Cormier, a self-described "renaissance man" who owns and runs a real estate agency with his wife Laura, is a food service executive chef and part owner of Austin-based Thin the Herd Guitars. "I was locked into Mercedes and Audi for 10 years," he added. "And felt trapped in an endless pit of maintenance costs." After owning the Genesis over the past two years — including using it as an Uber and Lyft driver to earn extra cash — Cormier learned what some frugal luxury sedan buyers and a handful of car reviewers have discovered: Genesis offers great bang for the buck compared to other premium brands and can compete with the best in terms of performance, features and comfort. Hyundai's luxury brand also earned a prominent third-party endorsement last week when for the first time Genesis topped J.D. Power's 2018 APEAL study, surpassing German luxury-performance icon Porsche. The APEAL study (which stands for Automotive Performance, Execution and Layout) "measures owners' emotional attachment and level of excitement across 77 attributes," ranging from performance to comfort, and asks nearly 68,000 owners of new 2018 models to score vehicles on a 1,000-point scale. In its second year ranked as a stand-alone brand, Genesis earned an APEAL score that bumped it up 15 points to 884 and helped push it past Porsche — and past BMW, Lincoln, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volvo, Cadillac, Land Rover and Lexus, in order of ranking. Last month, Genesis also topped J.D. Power's Initial Quality Survey (IQS) for the first time this year. And both its models were awarded Top Safety Pick Plus ratings by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, among 11 Plus ratings in all for Korean vehicles. Despite high J.D. Power rankings and great reviews, Genesis U.S. sales were off 50 percent for the first six months of 2018 compared to 2017, and in June Genesis sold only 796 vehicles — the first time U.S. numbers dropped below 1,000 in a month. Part of Genesis's APEAL and IQS success can be attributed to its small product lineup: just two models, the G80 and G90 sedans, with a third, the 2019 G70, launching later this year. And while those numbers may help in J.D.

Audi: 20-25% of our cars will have a plug by 2025

If you like the promise of Audi's E-Tron Quattro concept, you're going to love this post. Speaking at an intimate dinner in Los Angeles the night before the start of the Los Angeles Auto Show, Audi of America president Scott Keogh had nothing but positive things to say about his brand's future plug-in vehicles, including the production version of the E-Tron Quattro. The most interesting was that he said he expects a full 20 to 25 percent of Audi's sales to be electrified by around 2025, and there was lots of detail to back up his vision. "This is the reality as we see it." - Scott Keogh Keogh wasn't making specific predictions, but it's been a long while since we've heard such a high-level Audi executive act like such a troubadour for the electric vehicle future. As long-time readers will remember, we used to hear things like this from Nissan's Carlos Ghosn, but public predictions have taken a bit of a back seat recently. It's promising to hear reasonable optimism again. "When you look at what needs to happen and you look at what we see happening in the marketplace, we're probably looking at a world where 25 percent of Audi's sales, over the next ten years, just to throw out a rough point in the future, are either going to be full electric or have some plug," Keogh said. "This is the reality as we see it." The reason Keogh is so positive is because Audi thinks the E-Tron Quattro concept is going to birth one heck of an EV. Whatever it's called when it arrives – it's unlikely to be the Q6, as some rumors have it. Internally, Audi is calling it the C-BEV, since it is a C-segment Battery Electric Vehicle – the concept previews a luxury all-electric vehicle with a range of over 300 miles. No one is talking about the price yet, but Audi of America's director of product management, Filip Brabec, did say that the sweet spot for the pricing is in the range of how mainstream luxury vehicles are priced today. "If you can put a car in the market that's priced right ... people are going to want to buy it," Keogh said. Read into all of that what you will. It's not just the price that's going to be right. Keogh said that the key point is changing hearts and minds to want electric vehicles. That means tripling down on public infrastructure (see more below) and making sure the car itself is amazing. "Everyone knows, in the history of the world, launch a defining, game-changing product, in whatever category it bloody is, and - boom - the world changes," Keogh said.

VW Group exploring F1 options, would likely wait until Ecclestone is out

The real hurdle is that Volkswagen overlord Ferdinand Piech doesn't like Bernie Ecclestone on a personal or professional level. Superbugs. They are antiobiotic-resistant bacteria and viruses, fiends that defy eradication no matter how much counteracting agent you throw at them. Reports that Audi is going to join Formula One? They are the superbugs of rumors; for five years they've been coursing through the blood of motorsport, and no amount of denials or Audi's continued non-presence in F1 has been able to make them go away. Not even a month ago we contracted another bout of it, courtesy of Auto Express, citing sources who said Audi would leave endurance racing and DTM - handing Le Mans over to Porsche, instead of the other way around - and buy either Red Bull or Toro Rosso for an entry in 2016 with an in-house powerplant. Within 24 hours of that story, Audi Sport sent the tweet, "Audi in F1? There rumors keep appearing with regularity since years. It's pure speculation again this time and without any foundation." Now, few things are impossible in F1, but lining up on the grid in 2016 is not far away from needing to be ready tomorrow, in F1 terms, which is why these announcements come long in advance. Honda, you'll recall, gave us almost two years' notice of its F1 reunion and Porsche gave us three years notice about Le Mans. A brand-new report in the BBC says that Audi is using new hire and ex-Ferrari technical director Stefano Domenicali to lead a feasibility study into an F1 program. According to that story, the real hurdle to the foray, however, is that Volkswagen Group overlord Ferdinand Piech doesn't like F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone on a personal or professional level, so one of them would need to leave his position before Audi could say yes, feasibility be damned. Since we're talking about two men who define professional longevity, that day might not come soon. The BBC story goes on to say that Martin Winterkorn, head of the VW Group management board, would like to see the group in F1, and that if it happened it would be with a "car designed and made in Germany." Ladies and gentlemen, you know where to file this one...