‘Defect’ Flap Driving Audi Buyers Away : Dealers Decry ‘Hysteria’ Over Acceleration Probe
As consumers, regulators and the company argue over whether the Audi 5000 S has a safety defect, the marketplace is voting with its wallets.
Auto dealers are using terms like “severe” and “mass hysteria” to describe the plummeting fortunes of the vehicle named by a national car magazine as one of the 10 best cars in America in 1986.
Audi of America Inc., a subsidiary of West Germany’s Volkswagenwerk AG and Volkswagen United States, sold 74,000 cars in this country in 1985.
“But this year we’ll be lucky to sell 60,000,” said Audi spokesman Joe Bennett. He said buyer reaction against the automatic-shift 5000 S, which has been accused of sometimes accelerating unexpectedly, is affecting other Audi car lines as well.
Audi’s year-to-date U.S. sales number 56,009 cars, a 17.3% decline from the 67,718 cars the company sold in this country during the same period in 1985.
Resale values are skidding, too. Some Washington area dealers in European cars report that owners are so eager to unload the cars that they will trade in mint-condition 1985 Audi 5000 S models for as little as $7,500--about half those cars’ pre-bad-news trade-in value. In general, new Audi cars carry a median $20,300 purchase price.
Calls It Unfair
“ ‘Mass hysteria’ are the only two words I can use for what’s going on,” said Alan Luger, sales manager for Tischer Autopark Inc. in Silver Spring, Md. Tischer sells Audi, Porsche, BMW and Subaru models.
“Negative and unfair publicity” about Audi’s alleged problems with sudden acceleration is turning buyers away from all Audi cars, Luger said.
General Motors hailed the Corvair as its “entry into a distinctively new car class” when the compact car was introduced in October, 1959. The Corvair initially won rapid public acceptance, but it ran into a storm of criticism over handling problems that, some critics charged, could cause roll-overs in certain turns. Corvair sales plunged; by 1969 GM had scrapped the car.
Audi officials nervously predict that the automatic Audi 5000 S will survive its difficulties. But they concede that growing public concern, fed by media coverage such as a recent “60 Minutes” report on CBS, could bury the sleek, once-prestigious model line before its time.
John Krogsund, sales manager at Heishman Porsche & Audi Inc. in Arlington, Va. said:
Other Models Preferred
“We’re the victims of a wide sweep with a tar brush. Yeah, it’s hurting sales. People are just not coming in for the Audi 5000 S automatics. They’re coming in for the Audi 4000 series and the Audi Quattro, but they’re not looking at the 5000s at all.”
Bad publicity, he said, is “really affecting all Audi sales; and if it’s affecting sales, well, naturally, it’s going to affect resale value. . . . I can’t totally blame the buying public. I mean, would you go out and buy a refrigerator or some other appliance if someone told you that it was going to break down, explode or something?
“The problem isn’t whether unintended acceleration occurs or not. The problem is, if there is such a thing, finding it and fixing it, solving the problem and relieving people’s anxiety.
“Right now, yeah, there is a lot of hysteria out there. That’s the only way I can describe it,” Krogsund said.
Sudden acceleration can occur when the driver of an automatic-shift car moves the shift stick from “park” to “reverse” or “drive.” Typically, the affected vehicle shoots backward or forward with unexpected speed.
Front-wheel-drive and rear-wheel-drive cars equipped with computerized, fuel-injected engines often are cited in reports of sudden acceleration. Most of those cars have automatic transmissions, which are called “trans-axles” in the front-wheel-drive versions.
Eight-Year Span
Affected Audi models include an estimated 230,000, front-wheel-drive 5000 S automatics manufactured for the 1978 through the 1986 model years.
But according to records at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, nearly every major auto maker doing business in the United States has received complaints of sudden acceleration. Affected auto makers include American Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., Honda Motor Co. Ltd., Mercedes-Benz, Nissan Motor Co. Ltd., Toyota Motor Corp. and AB Volvo.
As many as 60 million vehicles on American roads today could have sudden acceleration problems, according to federal and industry reports.
So why all of the fuss over Audi, a company that sells fewer cars annually than one car line of one GM or Ford division?
NHTSA and auto safety advocates said the answer is in numbers. Audi officials and dealers said the answer is in politics, as well as in some poorly thought out public relations moves on Audi’s part.
Recall Urged
NHTSA, under pressure from consumers and Congress, urged Audi last week to voluntarily recall all of the 1978-1986 automatic-shift 5000 S cars suspected of having dangerously defective acceleration. Audi officials say they are puzzled by NHTSA’s action because the company already had initiated a recall to address the problem.
Since last July, Audi has been bringing back 200,000 of the 5000 S models for installation of an automatic shift-lock device that prevents drivers from shifting from “park” to “reverse” or “drive” without first stepping on the brakes.
More Extensive Studing
NHTSA officials said their action is designed to get Audi to do a more extensive study of the problem and to come up with other potential fixes.
NHTSA presumably could have requested the same effort of GM and Volvo. But the agency earlier this year closed its GM and Volvo sudden-acceleration investigations on grounds that the cars produced by those two companies showed “no defect trend.”
On Nov. 3, the agency also closed its sudden-acceleration investigation of Honda without any finding of fault against that company. Affected were 1984-1986 Honda Accords. NHTSA said it had not found a defect trend.
But NHTSA officials said the defect trend in Audi cars is strong.
The affected 230,000 Audi cars are the targets of 561 sudden-acceleration complaints, more than 200 complaints for every 100,000 cars in the group.
“That’s a high complaint ratio,” one NHTSA official said.
An estimated 417 of the Audi complaints involve reports of accidents. Those accidents involve 228 reported injuries and four reported deaths.
Reversing a Stastistic
Audi officials counter, saying that NHTSA’s own numbers mean about 99% of the drivers of the suspect 1978-1986 Audis have had no problems with sudden acceleration.
“The incredibly greater number of our cars are clean on this issue. They’re not involved,” said Audi’s Bennett.
Bennett said the “horrendous drop” in Audi sales and resale values “is due entirely to the false representation that all of these cars are defective.”
But some auto industry analysts believe that Audi is at fault--in terms of public relations, if not product quality.
Look at the people who buy the Audi 5000 S, the critics say. According to the company’s own demographic profile, those buyers have a median age of 42, an average annual household income of $69,000. Approximately 68% of the Audi 5000 S buyers are male; 88% are married; 71% have at least an undergraduate college degree, and 64% are employed in what Audi describes as “upper white collar jobs.”
Compounding an Error
Audi’s initial response to sudden-acceleration complaints was to tell 5000 S owners that they were shifting gears without stepping on the brake, and that they then were compounding the error by stepping on the accelerator instead of the brake.
“Even if it were true, it was the dumbest damned thing in the world to tell that crowd,” said a GM official, speaking privately. “You just don’t tell people in that group that they don’t know how to drive a car. That’s asking for trouble.”
And trouble is exactly what Audi got in January, 1986, when it dealt with the sudden-acceleration complaint of Marion Weisfelner, a woman in Plainview, N.Y., who runs a dry cleaning store with her husband.
“I put my car in reverse and it accelerated backward,” said Weisfelner, recalling the events that led to the development of a national movement against Audi. “I hit a tree. I knew immediately that the problem was with the car, and not with me.”
Weisfelner took her complaints to Audi officials in New York.
Lack of Interest
“But they really showed a lack of interest in the whole story. They kept saying that it was my fault. They told me that they’d never heard of this before.”
Dissatisfied, Weisfelner began questioning friends who owned Audi 5000 S cars. One friend, Alice Weinstein, who operates a mail-order firm, said she had a similar Audi experience. The two women began making telephone calls and sending out letters. Soon, they had 50 or so names of Audi 5000 S owners who said they experienced the sudden-acceleration syndrome.
The disparate names became an organization, the Audi Victims Network. The network reached out to other groups, most notably to the New York Public Interest Research Group, and to the Center for Auto Safety in Washington.
More Complaints
Press releases on the “runaway Audi problem” began flowing. Stories began appearing. More Audi sudden-acceleration complaints rolled in.
In March, the Audi Victims Network and its support groups hit pay dirt. New York Attorney General Robert Abrams called on the U.S. Department of Transportation to investigate and recall more than 200,000 Audi 5000 S models equipped with automatic gearboxes and built since 1978.
Audi voluntarily responded in July, 1986, with its “service campaign” to install automatic shift-lock devices designed to force drivers to apply brakes before engaging the “reverse” or “drive” gears. NHTSA opened a formal defect investigation on Aug. 15.
Auto safety advocates attacked the Audi service campaign as an insulting placebo.
Calls It a Failure
“This modification does not fix the car, it fixes the driver,” said Alice Weinstein, president of the Audi Victims Network. “It is as useful as offering training wheels on an adult bicycle.”
Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety, called the Audi fix-it program a failure, because two 5000 S cars equipped with shift locks were involved in sudden-acceleration accidents “within weeks” after the locks were installed.
Audi’s Bennett, who took over the company’s public relations chores months after the sudden-acceleration dispute had taken off, conceded that the company had difficulties with some of the initial shift-lock devices. But the problems stemmed from installation, not product quality, Bennett said.
“We’ve had 11 reports of cars with auto shift locks being involved in accidents,” Bennett said. “But we have not had a single report of a sudden-acceleration accident where these locks were properly installed.”
Satifies Some Buyers
Audi dealers have put in about 65,000 of the locks so far. Locally, that procedure satisfies most customers. But it angers others, said Gary Long, service manager at Tischer Autopark.
“In one out of every five installations, a customer comes back into the shop complaining that he can’t move the gearshift on his car,” Long said. “When I tell them that they have to put their foot on the brake before shifting, some of them act surprised, like they’ve been driving all the time like that--shifting gears without stepping on the brake.”
Weisfelner does not accept that argument.
“It’s more blaming the victims,” she said. She also dismisses allegations that her “victims group” is focusing unfairly on Audi.
Magazine Criticized
“We’re not picking on them,” said Weisfelner, who now drives a Mercury Grand Marquis. “We had the accidents in an Audi, not in another car. Maybe the people who had accidents in other cars can ‘pick on’ those manufacturers.”
But Weisfelner said she has no qualms about singling out Car and Driver magazine for criticism. In its January, 1987, issue, the auto buff publication names the Audi 5000 S&CS; Turbo one of the 10 best cars sold in the United States in 1986. The award was based on the car’s handling, performance and styling, the magazine said.
“It’s a nice car and it handles well and all of that,” said Weisfelner. “But if there’s any doubt about the safety of the vehicle, it doesn’t belong on anybody’s ‘10-best’ list.”
