Diego Ramos is calling his initial fact-finding jaunt across Canada to visit Audi's 35 dealers his "big eyes, big ears, small mouth" tour.
"The first thing I have to learn is what kind of product we need here," says the 46-year-old multilingual Spaniard. Born in France, he lived there until he was 15 when he moved to a small town 30 kilometres north of Barcelona, Spain. Along the way, he has learned to speak not just French and Spanish, but also English, German, Portuguese and Catalan, the native language of the northeast corner of Spain near Barcelona.
Ramos, a mechanical engineer by training but a motorcycle nut by temperament, is the new head of Audi Canada. That's interesting because there was no old head. Audi for years and years has been running its Canadian operation out of its U.S. headquarters in Auburn Hills, Mich.
The wisdom of that can be found in Audi's sales numbers in Canada: 7,422 cars sold in 2004. The other two big German luxury brands, BMW and Mercedes-Benz, sold 16,598 and 12,337 respectively. So with BMW selling more than twice as many cars as Audi, and Mercedes enjoying a 60-per-cent edge in sales, Volkswagen's luxury division clearly has some catching up to do.
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