Audi Promotes Diesel "Right Now" Over Hybrids to Save Oil

Audi began a U.S. ad campaign this week focused on the viability of diesel autos versus gasoline-electric hybrids and those that run on batteries. A diesel Q7 sport-utility vehicle went on sale six weeks ago, and a diesel A3 wagon is due late this year.

“We’re not saying these technologies are nonsense,” Johan de Nysschen, president of Audi of America Inc., said yesterday in a telephone interview. “For us the appeal of the clean diesel technology is that it is here right now.”

Volkswagen and Audi have emphasized diesel engines, which power 50 percent of European cars, rather than the focus on electricity favored by U.S. and Japanese automakers. President Barack Obama’s administration seems to back electric autos over diesels, said de Nysschen, who is based in Herndon, Virginia.

One ad among Audi’s television and Internet spots shows barrels rolling through streets and onto a supertanker, saying that if a third of Americans drove diesel autos, daily imported- oil use would fall by 1.5 million barrels. Diesel engines are as much as 30 percent more efficient than gasoline models.

Diesel vehicles now account for about 3 percent of sales in the U.S., according to research firm J.D. Power & Associates of Westlake Village, California. Hybrids have a similar market share, J.D. Power estimates. Audi expects diesels to be 15 percent of all U.S. deliveries in 15 years.

Smell, Power

Rising fuel prices in the late 1970s and 1980s spurred automakers including General Motors Corp. and Wolfsburg, Germany-based Volkswagen to sell diesels. Buyers didn’t like the cars’ smell, lack of power and difficult cold-weather starts.

Newer diesel engines feature better performance and fewer odors. Stuttgart, Germany-based Daimler AG renewed the push for diesel vehicles in the U.S. two years ago with three diesel SUVs from Mercedes-Benz.

In 2008, Volkswagen resumed sales of its Jetta TDI after a one-year hiatus, while Munich-based Bayerische Motoren Werke AG offered BMW 335 sedans and X5 diesel SUVs.

De Nysschen said competition among the companies thwarted efforts to jointly market the advantages of diesels over gasoline-powered autos.

“If the automakers had any sense, we would collaborate and do this together,” de Nysschen said.

U.S. buyers of the diesels offered by all of the German automakers qualify for tax credits of as much as $1,800 for fuel-efficient vehicles.

Audi has outperformed most automakers in the U.S. in 2009, with sales down only 18 percent to 36,820 units through May compared with a 37 percent industrywide decline. The company’s market share rose by a third, to 0.8 percent, according to research firm Autodata Corp. of Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey.

Source:Bloomberg