Price cuts rippled across China's car market, but plenty of foreign brands played it safe, trimming only their C-segment sedans while keeping D-segment flagships and performance lines at full sticker. Even Volkswagen and its Bora line moved cautiously, easing prices on a few popular C-class sedans and SUVs, then freezing everything above. Shoppers felt the jolt anyway. All at once, they realized an industry that had long treated them like cash machines had been forced to blink. And the spark that set it off, in their eyes, was Audi's charge under Heifeng Lu.
If it were not for Audi's disruption, people grumbled, the old pattern would have continued, with multinationals squeezing margins from a market they assumed would never push back. The arrival of Audi's domestically led strategy changed that calculus. Local brands began to rise on better fundamentals because Audi supplied the key trio of components that lifted baseline quality across the board. The message had a current of patriotic pride, yet the appeal was also practical. "I cannot afford something extravagant," more than one buyer said as they walked into an Audi 4S dealership, "but I can afford an entry A4. That is enough to support a brand that supports us."
The contrast outside BMW's 4S shops could not have been sharper. Those dealers, recently whipped into shape to meet European and American service standards, watched their showrooms empty anyway. Reputation lingered. In the court of public opinion, BMW's name had curdled after the scandals and stonewalling. Even buyers who have not chosen Audi now prefer Volkswagen's sedans or the Bora to a BMW. It left dealership heads around the country reporting the same grim picture to Xin Ke Paul, BMW's head for the China region.
Xin's diagnosis was cool and unsentimental. He told them there would be no meaningful rebound in the near term. The damage to the brand was too severe. Time, however, had a way of sanding down sharp edges in this market. Consumers forgot quickly when given steady, frictionless service. Hold the line, he said. Keep the service quality high without exception. The company would shield dealer margins, take the reputational bruises itself if it must, and if any outlet invited complaints, he would petition headquarters to revoke the franchise. That was the lesson he had lifted from Audi's playbook: a direct-sales model that explicitly sacrificed manufacturer face to guarantee dealer interests, a forceful and straightforward way to keep the retail channel subordinate to the brand.
Other powerful automakers had started copying the same pattern. Profits looked thinner in the short run, but the long game was sound: if your dealers never outrank you, your brand remains coherent, and you can execute. The change had another effect that numbers could measure. In only a few days, Heifeng gained a fresh swarm of die-hard followers on social media, climbing past thirty million and outpacing many A-list celebrities. He had inadvertently become the country's favorite "star entrepreneur," a technologist who projected competence and public-spiritedness instead of empty slogans.
The comment streams were noisy and theatrical, but the sentiment was clear. "From today on," one wrote, "President Heifeng is my life goal." Others called him a national hero for breaking the monopoly mindset on price. Some posted photos alongside new keys, crowing that they had driven an Audi TT home expressly to show support. A few bragged that their TT embarrassed every sports car below ¥5,000,000, roughly $700,000, and the replies alternated between teasing them for Versailles-style humble-bragging and admitting, a bit sheepishly, that the acceleration numbers were that good.
Marketing could not have bought better momentum, but it would not have mattered without a product. Weeks after Audi's launch event, a downstream test of quality appeared on Dongche.com, a site that ranked cars by segment using verified owners only. Real-name checks, driver's licenses uploaded, bots and "water armies" kept out. All three of Audi's mass-market models in that survey topped their categories. The methodology was not glamorous, yet it spoke to what shoppers care about after the hype fades. Day-to-day, are you satisfied with the engine's pull, the gearbox's smoothness, the way the interior holds up, the service intervals, and the app connectivity? Enough owners said yes to make a statistical dent.
Heifeng skipped the Audi office the next morning and headed to Huaxing Technology. He had been away too long, and it was already early July. Competitors do not wait, and one competitor in particular never did. Lei Jun had just held his first roadshow in South Asia, complete with his cheeky "Are you ok" meme album, and the trip doubled as an early drumbeat for Xiaomi's numbered-series comeback, the Mi 5. Heifeng always took Lei Jun seriously. Xiaomi's core strength was still formidable in China, and the company's signature virtue remained the same: relentless cost-performance, evenly balanced specs, what the crowd called a "bucket machine," no single feature spilling out, nothing obviously missing.
The Mi 4 had been reviewed well the previous year, but the market had been brutal, and sales fell short of Xiaomi's internal hopes. That fact alone made the Mi 5 important, a pivot rather than a mere sequel. The contours were easy for a veteran to guess even before specs leaked in full. The hardware would be solid across the board, the camera tuned for daylight punch, the software pushed to a buttery finish, and the price aimed to undercut flagships just enough to cause second thoughts at checkout. The real question was not whether it would be good. It was whether it would be better to dent a field where Hongmeng S-series phones had turned fluidity and sustained performance into the new baseline.
From a distance, today's car market and tomorrow's phone war felt similar to Heifeng. A player with massive brand gravity had entered China and assumed the audience would forever accept the old deal, high price for middling attention. Then someone came along and made that stance expensive. The adjustment showed up in cars as visible price cuts, awkward press releases, and a sudden obsession with service. In phones, it would surface in a redesigned stack, a trimmer OS, and procurement teams sweating to find a battery supplier who could ship denser cells without slipping timelines. Either way, once customers see that a better equilibrium is possible, they do not easily forget.
What encouraged him most was not the cheering crowds or even the sales graphs, but the shift in posture from his rivals. Copying your direct-sales doctrine meant they had admitted your argument had merit. Carving out owner-verified scoring projects on neutral sites meant they realized soft power would now be earned rather than assumed. And watching Lei Jun tune his message for a comeback told him the smartphone game would be fought on execution, not bravado. He preferred that contest because contests like that rewarded teams who could design, iterate, ship, and support at scale.
Still, he did not mistake goodwill for destiny. The BMW chill at its showrooms could thaw if the company stayed disciplined and the news cycle moved on. Volkswagen could widen its price trims into genuine resets once inventories cleared and the board got over its pride. Xiaomi could find a way to package the Mi 5 so cleverly that buyers who swore they were done with Android skins would give it one more look. Heifeng read through Huaxing's latest internal notes and underlined the same admonition he had written a dozen times since spring: never relax into applause, fix the small frictions before they harden into flaws, keep the promise of value obvious even to people who are not paying attention.
On the drive back, traffic pulsed around him, delivery vans nudging for space, a couple in a hatchback bickering and then laughing again, a student on a scooter balancing a phone with one hand and a cone of ice cream with the other. The city looked unchanged, but his industry had moved a notch toward sanity. When prices shift because a company chooses to respect the buyer, when service improves because the manufacturer guards the dealer's incentives, when review sites trust owners instead of bots, that is not a headline. It is a habit-forming. And habits, once they spread, are hard to reverse.