The morning after the blind date, Heifeng Lu said goodbye to his grandparents and flew back to Piao City. It was August already, the Beijing errands were done, and Huaxing Technology needed him back at the helm. There was one more promise to keep; he had to put in the handcrafted order for the sports car he had agreed to give Zhining Chen.
Audi's A8 had found its legs, but even with momentum, Heifeng judged that two thousand units a day was about its ceiling. He did not foresee what happened next. As the Beijing Summit opened, the A8 kept popping up on television as an event courtesy car.
People who had vaguely heard about the launch but knew nothing about the car suddenly got curious and drove to dealerships to see for themselves. The build quality, the way it rode, the quiet status it projected, these were the kinds of things that sealed a decision within minutes, and a fresh wave of orders followed.
When the summit coverage wound down, Focus Report aired the interview segment that Xiu Wang's team had taped. The program cut together Heifeng's story, the false starts and hard turns of building Audi, and the line that set the internet buzzing.
He had smiled as he said it on camera, almost offhand, yet it landed like a hammer. "Honestly, I am not interested in how much money Audi can make. Money is just a number to me now. If we can force our peers to earn a little less here and save Chinese consumers a great deal on their cars, that is what I care about."
The comment section ignited.
"As expected from Audi's chairman, that is real backbone."
"If there were no Audi, regular people still would not touch a so-called luxury car."
"Take life and death lightly, and fight if you do not agree, that is how an entrepreneur should sound."
"President Lu, I give your swagger 96 points, and I will send the rest as 666."
Jokes aside, the admiration felt genuine. People had watched foreign badges charge one way at home and another way in China for years. With Audi's rise, prices had been dragged toward fair, and fee schedules had been forced into daylight. Consumer-rights fights that once took forever now moved quickly because carmakers knew there was a new center of gravity in the market.
The night the Focus Report aired, the numbers ticked in. Heifeng's Weibo following jumped from 40 million to 50 million, with ten million new fans in a few hours. By morning, Audi showrooms were crowded again, buyers comparing trims and colors with a level of patience that only comes when a purchase decision is already made in the mind.
Whatever else could be said, the program had delivered, and it was Heifeng's matter-of-fact tone, not the lighting or the edit, that did the pulling.
The knock-on effects were even broader. Corporate procurement teams began calling the headquarters switchboard. In the last few days alone, Alibaba Group, Tencent, JD.com, Wanda Group, and other large firms placed bulk orders for Audi A6s and A8s as business fleet cars.
The A8's positioning as a leader's vehicle gave it unusual weight for reception use, and the A6 covered the rest, a one-two combination that solved a year's worth of company hospitality planning in an afternoon.
Across town, the coordinated pressure campaign from BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen was unraveling in real time. Paul Xinke, BMW's top man in China, slammed his glass down at home and swore.
They had mapped the whole thing, synchronized launches, celebrity pageants, ad buys that blotted out the sky, and for two days, the numbers had rewarded them. Then, a celebrity Weibo post, the summit cameras, and a prime-time interview tipped the narrative, and the A8 exploded out of their trap.
The final insult cut deep; the BMW 735 had been penciled in as an official courtesy car for the summit, but the role went to Audi. Paul learned that as he watched the summit news broadcast, his jaw was tight.
"Bastards," he hissed. "These people do not keep their word." It did not matter how angry he got. The situation had flipped. The more he replayed the last week, the more pointless it felt to keep slamming into Audi head-on. Audi had the wind, and the three-brand squeeze had already burned through more than ¥1,000,000,000 (≈ $142,857,000) in media and promotions around the A8 launch. Lose more, and he would be the one answering to Europe.
He made the pragmatic call, back off the frontal assault. Put the money into the basics. He dialed his counterparts at Mercedes-Benz China and Volkswagen China. For the near term, stop trying to out-sprint Audi on unit sales. Focus on service.
Upgrade every 4S store experience, shore up quality, and rebuild the everyday face of the German luxury trio from the bottom up. In a market this hot, face was won one service ticket at a time. If they tried to match Audi punch for punch right now, they would only bleed more.
Back in Piao City, Heifeng closed his laptop and allowed himself a small smile. He had not planned any of it, not the summit camera angles, not the post that detonated on Weibo, not the way a single sentence would echo through a program watched by millions.
He had said what he believed. If that drew people to his company's cars, he would take the outcome with thanks, and then he would put the pressure where it always belonged, on the next car to roll off the line and the next customer to drive one out the door.