Why consumer demand is driving more from luxury car brands

While demand for luxury vehicles hasn’t seen significant flux due to the pandemic, what customers demand from a brand has shifted dramatically.

“They want to know how you can take care of them without them coming to the show room,” Kargar said.

For Infiniti Motors, the upscale division of Nissan, this has meant offering more flexibility for customers in terms of sales and financing options, as well as after sales and on service options, the executive said.

In the Middle East, demand is gradually clawing its way back with Infiniti’s QX50 model, recording a 32 percent sales increase in the second half of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. Meanwhile, the QX80 posted 10 percent sales growth in Q3 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.

The Middle East market, in a glut since 2014 due to falling oiling prices and now a pandemic, is poised for a comeback, Kargar said.

“No one can forecast the speed at which [the Middle East market] will come back, but it’s an important market for us,” he said.

The pandemic has hit all industries hard, including the luxury car industry. In March 2020, a headline from MotorBiscuit declared “Infiniti will be dead by 2030: Here’s why”, outlining how the brand and its parent company have struggled to make money, even before the pandemic.

Infiniti Motor Company senior vice president and chairperson Peyman Kargar

Parent company Nissan saw a 73 percent drop in global profit in the first two quarters of 2019. In November 2018, the chief of the Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi alliance was arrested on fraud charges in Tokyo.

While in 2018, Infiniti sold only 249,000 vehicles; in 2019, numbers fell to 188,994.

But Kargar said his brand will be sticking around, with two new vehicles set to launch in the Middle East market in early 2022.

He explained that people “want to be in power and they want to feel serene while driving a car”, and Infiniti is trying to deliver this feeling to its buyers across the globe.