Dubai The world's largest Audi showroom will open in November on Dubai's Shaikh Zayed Road.
Built to the ‘Audi Terminal' concept the new Dubai facility will span five floors, with the showroom taking up three.
Up to 60 cars can be on display at any given time. (The first Audi Terminal showroom in the region opened in Saudi Arabia.)
If the intention was to stand out on a stretch of highway that is choc-a-bloc with swank car showrooms, the new facility has got that right. But according to the head of the Audi dealership for Dubai and the northern emirates, there's more.
"Look at the styling of the cars — the TT or an A7," said K. Rajaram, CEO of Al Nabooda Automobiles. "They make a statement in terms of their design and style. So the building must in some way stand up and say something about the cars being sold within.
Big investment
"It's not like selling a boxy car like some of our competition does. All of the Audi models have been style icons."
The facility will formally open in November.. At Dh100 million, investments have been substantial. Rajaram, however, has no regrets.
"A substantial part of it was for the value of the land and land on Shaikh Zayed Road cannot be measured purely in cost terms," he said. "Twenty years from now if we are having the same conversation, land would be worth a fortune. As a company, you build for the future."
Al Nabooda Automobiles will shortly open a facility in Fujairah built on the same lines, but smaller.
"The Audi corporate design has worked it out in such a way that this building can be scaled to be a showroom with eight cars or for 50 to 60 cars," said Rajaram.
"This is why we have the vertical structure. All we have to do is cut floors. Nobody has the array of lifts that we have that takes the cars up three floors."
Model line-up
But wouldn't it better for all concerned to have the new cars on the roads than park them in a showroom? In other words, aren't they taking up valuable real estate? "We have a model range that starts from the A1 to the A8 and every single digit in between is covered," Rajaram says. "Each of them has different engine capacity, and we have not even got to the sports cars and the Q7s. We have a model line-up far bigger than any of our competitors."
"The footprint I am using for the showroom is not huge — we are just going up. I am building on air. It does not cost as much as it would have if I had gone for a large expanse of land."
All that remains to be done is to sell more Audis. "Audi is working on Strategy 2020 and that's to be the number one; it's already number one in Europe.," said Rajaram. "We are waiting to emulate what was done in Europe in the UAE."
