Mark Templin, group vice president and general manager of Lexus

A CONVERSATION WITH MARK TEMPLIN

Mark Templin, group vice president and general manager of Lexus, recently was in South Florida for forums with customers.

Templin, who joined the company in 1990, is responsible for all aspects of the Lexus automotive operations, including sales and marketing, retail development, customer satisfaction and product planning. His responsibilities also include coordinating sales activities, dealer relations, parts and service operations, and the marketing operations of four regional offices around the country.

Prior to his current position, Templin served as vice president of Scion, responsible for all Scion activities.

Templin has held a number of positions, including Lexus Southern area manager, and assistant area manager for both the Southern and Western area Lexus offices. He also served as sales administration manager and retail operations manager at Lexus' national headquarters in Torrance, Calif., and as vice president of parts, service, customer satisfaction, and training for the Lexus Division.

Before coming to Toyota, Templin held several positions at the Oldsmobile Division of General Motors Corporation.

A graduate of Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg, Mo., Templin earned a degree in automotive technology.

During his South Florida stopover, Templin hosted a panel of SAMA members to talk about issues regarding the luxury car market and the automotive industry in general.

He sees some good things coming with the industry growing as whole and the luxury segment itself slightly increasing to about 12 percent from the current 11 percent share with many new competitors joining the top three leaders of Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW.

What follows is a transcript edited for clarity of the roundtable discussion. It is being posted for SAMA members to use as they desire or simply for background information.

SAMA: In a recent interview with Automotive News, you talked about the effect of Japan’s earthquake on Lexus production and sales and how it likely will knock Lexus from the No. 1 spot in the U.S. luxury market. Lexus is also facing competition from Mercedes-Benz and BMW. What is your outlook for Lexus both in the immediate future and in the long term?

TEMPLIN: The immediate sales volume you’re going to see a little bit of a dip. After March 11, there was a period of time when we didn’t produce anything. We got back within a week-and-a-half or two weeks we were back to producing a few cars. In our case, the CT and the HS went back into production, albeit on a smaller volume than normal so we were able to keep those going. But we went for period of time -- and I can’t tell you exactly how long it was -- before we did a lot. Now, our North American plant that builds the RX kept going for quite sometime on a little bit smaller volume than we typically do there, but we were able to keep it going because we had a lot of parts in the pipeline. A lot of the parts for that product are built in Japan so they were still in transit. That allowed us to keep building RXs during that time. But eventually that will catch up to the RX, too, so what you’re going to see is a a dip in production and then we’ll get it back to a level that is maybe half of what we would typically do through the summer months. By the fourth quarter this year, we expect to be back in business in full swing and doing what we would normally do for the fourth quarter of the year.

Long term, we’re really bullish on our industry and our place in that industry. For lots of reasons, we see the marketplace growing to at least as big as it was back pre-2007 when we were selling 15, 16, even 17 million cars a year. We see the market going back to that for a lot of reasons. As a country, we are going to add a hundred million people to the U.S. population over the next 40 years. There’s 300 million today. By 2050 there will be 400 million people living in the United States. I can show you a chart, like I’ve shown our dealers, showing historical sales as they relate to population, and they almost mirrors the population growth trend. That’s one thing.

There’s also a lot of pent-up demand right now because we had these three years where the economy tanked in 2008 and the industry fell 40 percent over two years. All of a sudden you had three years of lean sales relative to what we experienced before, and that’s going to create a lot of strange things. One is, in 2013 we’re going to end up with the lowest supply of one-to-five-year -old cars we’ve seen in more than a quarter of a century. What’s that going to do is raise resale value for these used cars, and buying new cars is going to be a better proposition than ever, especially in lease markets like here in South Florida. It’s a heavy lease-market for luxury car buyers. Residuals will be up, and that’s good for new-car buyers.

There’s also the fact that we have people living longer and driving longer and buying cars longer. We’re going to start selling cars to five generations of people for the first time in our history -- traditionals and Baby Boomers and Gen-X and Gen-Y. Gen-Y is now 16-to-30 years old. Those people haven’t bought many new cars yet because they’ve been too young. Now all of a sudden they’re going to start buying a lot of new cars. And next year Gen-Z is going to start getting their drivers licenses and they’re going to grow into buying new cars over the next decade. So all of a sudden we’re going to be selling cars to five generations. Gen-Y alone is 75 million people strong. It’s like the Baby Boomer generation all over again. That’s going to drive the future industry. As time goes by, we think that the luxury industry will grow faster than the mass mark does for a few reasons.

One is that the young people have grown up in a pretty affluent world and they expect to buy premium-branded goods. Talk to you people today about what they want to have. They have their first home. Are they going to go to Sears and buy the Sears brand appliances? No. They want Sub-Zero and Wolf and Viking in their kitchens. They want the Bosch appliances for washers and dryers. They want high-end everything. The same thing holds true for cars. They want to buy premium-branded goods, if they can.

The other thing is, we don’t worry so much about overall volume so much as we do competing in the segments where we want to compete. The luxury market will expand downward over the coming years. Mercedes has already announced they are gong to come with A- and B-Class cars that they sell in Europe and other places around the world to the U.S. BMW is going to come with a front-wheel drive Mini version of the BMW, something built off the Mini platform, smaller cars. So those are going to be more common in marketplace, but not because people are seeking those cars but because they are driving by government regulations.

When you think about it, we all have to meet Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. In our case we have this great partner called Toyota behind us that sells lots and lots of Corollas and Priuses, Yaris, and everything else. We already have the most fuel efficient fleet of luxury cars with five hybrids, so we don’t have to worry about that. We want to build cars that people want. So our intention is not to go down market and sell something smaller than the CT. The CT in the segment is as small as we plan to go. At least right now that’s what customers want. Time will tell of people are willing to pay a high price for an even smaller car. There are a lot of small cars with a lot of high technology.

SAMA: So your overall volume then may not match the competition.

TEMPLIN: We don’t worry about overall volume. It never was our goal to sell more volume than everyone. That was just a result of doing the right things. So we will continue to focus on the segments where we want to compete. We want to make sure we have the best quality product in those segments, and the styling that people want and we have the performance that people want. We will continue to focus on taking care of customers better than anyone us.

SAMA: How about performance models in the segment?

TEMPLIN: There is more of a demand for performance cars. Not everybody, but with five generations of consumers buying cars, there’s going to be a little more emphasis on performance. It still won’t be the majority of the people, but it’s an important segment of the marketplace. If you’ve seen some of the things we’ve done lately, with our F sport accessories and our F models and our sport edition LS and some of those things in addition to what I talked about earlier with the CT, the CT is a real good indication of what you are going to see in a lot of our products in the future. The CT has got a more rigid body structure. It’s got extra welds. It’s got a great seating position, a lower center of gravity, seats that are sportier with big bolsters. In fact, the bolsters on the seats on a CT are even stronger than the bolstering of the IS F which, if you’ve ever driven an IS F, you know it’s a fantastic performance car. The angle of the steering, the size of the steering wheel, the feeling of the steering wheel -- the steering and suspension on the car are unbelievable. Those are the things that are going to translate into a lot of our future cars.

The LFA was a huge exercise for us in learning about performance. If you’ve had any time in the seat of an LFA you know what a great product is. A lot of what went into the LFA and what was learned will translate into future products as well. Especially things like carbon fiber can be a big deal for us. Most people farm out the work for carbon fiber in their products, but we built all the capabilities to do those things in-house. We have weaving machines and everything else so we can weave our own carbon fiber. That will give us an advantage to do that in other products as we move forward.

The LFA was a great exercise in learning about suspension and steering systems and brakes and everything else.

SAMA: Does racing or testing play a bigger part in that development?

TEMPLIN: Of course, we’ll learn from both. The V10 engine we had on our LFA came from the Formula 1 racing research and development that we had done before. That’s where it started and it just built up from there. The LFA is where we are learning about what we put in our luxury cars on the performance side. We’ve raced the LFA for years at Nurburgring in 24-hour races there. The first time I drove an LFA was about eight years ago at the proving grounds in Arizona and that car had been in development for quite some time at that point. We put a lot in that and learned a lot from that car.

SAMA: Another big issue of the day is alternative-fuel vehicles. Lexus obviously is very committed to hybrids.

TEMPLIN: We are very bullish on hybrid. We have five today, and we intend to grow that number in the future. We still think hybrid is the best route because no matter what the basic power plant is, whether it’s gas or diesel or fuel cells in the future, hybrid just makes it more efficient. The use of motors to make things more efficient is really what it is doing. So hybrid will work forever in our mind. We just want to keep improving upon it and adding more hybrid products to our lineup. And we still dream of the possibility of someday having everything in our lineup available on a hybrid power train.

SAMA: Is fuel consumption a big factor in this segment?

TEMPLIN: It is because every time gas prices rise we see hybrid demand spike like crazy. About 15 percent of our RX were hybrid and 85 percent were gas. When gas prices spiked all of a sudden the demand cycle went like 30 to 40 percent for hybrid.

Now in Europe, hybrid is really hot. They almost did the opposite of us in Europe. They sell more hybrid than gas. In fact, they’ve gotten to the point where my counterpart in Europe want to make Lexus just a hybrid brand because CO2 requirements in Europe mean taxation. And gas prices are enormous there. Even in the cheapest countries it’s six or seven dollars a gallon equivalent. 

SAMA: Do you foresee something like that here? 

TEMPLIN: We don’t see it going that radically. But you probably see the same things we do on peak oil, and we do believe we will come to a point -- and we may already be there -- where gas prices stay up for the rest of our lives. We always saw gas going to four and five dollars a gallon and staying there. We thought that got pushed off a bit when in 2008 the global economic decline happened because the worldwide demand for oil-related products reduced for that period of time. But we saw that pushed off and now all of sudden it’s coming back quickly. We may already be at a plane where gas will never go back down again.

SAMA: Is Lexus doing anything about working with natural gas?

TEMPLIN: We have the capability of doing that, but we don’t see that being a long-term future. It’s not as high on our priority as expanding our hybrids and working on things like fuel cells. Whether it’s more efficient gas engines, whether it’s hybrids, whether it’s plug-in hybrids, whether it’s electric cars or fuel cells in the future, we’re working hard on all of those. And you know we spend more on R&D than anyone else so we’ll be prepared for whatever the right (development is).

SAMA: A recent study showed that the development of fuel cells and other fuel-saving technology will impact the market such that in California you will need only 10 to 15 percent of the current number of service stations that there are today. You won’t need one on every corner because you will have such a huge range with the new vehicles.

TEMPLIN: That’s good because the infrastructure is the biggest issue. How many of you have driven a fuel cell car? It’s unbelievable. I’ve driven our fuel cell cars. A couple of times I’ve taken them and driven them for a few days. I’m so impressed. All it is is that that fuel cell creates electricity and you’re driving an electric motor. Basically, you’re driving an electric car that’s driven by a different fuel cell. But our fuel cell cars are really quick. The torque is immediate and they’re quick. And quiet. You don’t hear anything, but they’re fun to drive.

SAMA: With all these developments, how much of what you do comes down to educating consumers?

TEMPLIN: We’re going to have to do a lot more. We’ve had to do a lot of education on hybrid technology and what that means. There’s still a lot of misperceptions about what that means. With fuel cell, we are going to have to take that ten steps further, I believe. People really don’t understand what that is all about. Interestingly, we just partnered with Shell for a new Shell hydrogen station right across the street from my office. I can sit in my office and look out the window and see a Shell hydrogen station. It’s a joint venture between us and Shell. We own the land and we let Shell build it. It’s not only a fueling station but an education station, a place where people can come and learn about hydrogen fuel cell technology.

SAMA: It’s happening now?

TEMPLIN: Yes. We’ve always had a hydrogen fueling station on our campus that wasn’t a public station. But now we see that there will be more hydrogen fuel cell cars on the road and here’s an opportunity to not only fill those products but educate people in the process.

SAMA: What is the role of diesel?

TEMPLIN: In Europe it’s really common, but we don’t see it becoming mainstream in the U.S. for a lot of reasons. Diesel prices are more expensive than gasoline to begin with and you take beyond that, most diesel vehicles are really more expensive. Most people charge as much or more for diesel technology. Just engines and the cleaning systems for them are more expensive than hybrids. And there is still a huge percentage of the population that has negative connotations of what diesel really is.

SAMA: Nobody has yet to come up with a hybrid diesel.

TEMPLIN: A lot of people are working on it. In addition to the fuel being more expensive, there aren’t as many stations that carry diesel and that’s a problem. I rented a truck to haul some stuff one time and I had to go to 12 stations before I found a place that I could get fuel for it. I thought I was going to run out before I found a place. I should have online and looked for a place before I started.

SAMA: How do you see things like Hyundai’s move up into the luxury market with the Equus impacting the segment?

TEMPLIN: It’s interesting because we’re not seeing a lot of cross shopping right now, but we watch that and watch consumer behavior rather closely. You can’t discount them at all because everyone discounted us 20 years ago and what happened there? We’re very successful. So you can’t discount what they’re doing. They’re working hard at trying to copy the formula that we put in place almost 22 years ago now.

SAMA: It seems I saw a lot of features on the Equus earlier on an LS.

TEMPLIN: If you look at it, they really copied spec for spec what that LS is. They took what is considered to be the best car on the market and said, here, let’s try to build exactly the same car. Everything, when you look at size of the engine, performance of the engine, the size of the brake, I mean everything, the dimensions, the specs, almost exact across the board. They really worked hard at trying to copy what we consider to be the best car in the world.

SAMA: I see a little bit of a trend to buy more American. Do you see it that way?

TEMPLIN: I don’t personally feel that and we don’t see it in our research. People do have more options than they have had in the past. Now all of a sudden we have a stronger industry with a lot of really strong players. Everybody is building better quality cars. So that opens the door for people to buy many more cars than they could with the same things than they could just a few years ago. The good thing for us, and we heard it loud and clear with the dinners we are having with customers, is that our brand is strong and the people we have been meeting with have been very staunch supporters of our brand. Even people who drive other cars say Lexus is a great brand, and they all agree Lexus has the best quality no matter what they drive.

A quote from one of the people we met with said we know the Lexus dealer experience is ten times better than what we get anywhere else. Most car brands think of their brands as product to product to product. In our case, we feel product is very important and we build great product. We don’t plan on giving up our lead in the quality of our product. But the dealer experience is at least as important as that if not even more important. It’s a big part of our brand and something we are going to work even harder on.

SAMA: I believe what’s happening now is people are going to American dealerships and trying them out.

TEMPLIN: Giving them a chance, yes. Cadillac is putting out a good product. The SRX is doing well. CTS is doing well. I think they have some products coming. But they’re not the only ones that have new products coming. We have a lot of tricks up our sleeve as well. In 2012 and 20123 are going to be really good years for us. I’m excited about it.

SAMA: When it comes to numbers, how is Lexus doing in the Hispanic market?

TEMPLIN: We have the highest share in the Hispanic market of anyone. We do really well with the Hispanic population and the African-American population, and we do really well with the Asian population as well. Our biggest market share markets are places like Florida and Texas and California. We do really well in those markets. Florida, Texas, and California are the three biggest markets we have.

The northeastern part of the country was always the mainstay of the Europeans. That’s where their headquarters are and they were always strong there. We’ve grown tremendously and throughout the downturn of ’08 and ’09 we actually held our own there better than anywhere else in the country. We actually started to make some inroads. But their pure volume is bigger there than in other places.

But we get huge shares here. The southern area, I ran the 11 states here for six years and we had the highest market share in the country. There are places like North Carolina where the LS gets 60 percent market share in the segment in which it competes. It’s unbelievable.

SAMA: On a personal note, what got you into the car business?

TEMPLIN: I told this story the other night to a group of customers. Somebody asked me the same question. I told them my first car was a 1952 Chevrolet pickup. I bought it for $75. It didn’t have any brake fluid, so I had to get the brakes working before I could even drive it. Then when I took off to drive it, I was getting ready to drive out of the parking lot where it had been parked for a long time and there’s a car coming down a long hill. I knew I had time to beat it out in the street and I took off. I realized as I was leaving the thing wouldn’t turn left. Then I was committed and there was a car coming so I just drove right over the curb and into the grass on the other side of the road. So I ended up driving it 75 miles home making right turns. No license plate and right turns for 75 miles until I could get it back to my parents’ house.

My dad and started fixing that truck up. We didn’t spend much money on it. The first thing I did was take apart the steering gear and the shaft had been twisted. Imagine what you would have to do to twist the shaft inside of the steering. But anyway, we got it fixed. W redid the wood bed in the thing and started fixing the whole floorboard and started doing the whole thing. I put very little money in it other than our labor. This was summer time and I was getting ready to go to college. I was driving it to work and I threw a rod through the side of the block. I was going to be leaving. I was going to go play football in college and I needed to leave to get to football, so I sold it. Even with a hole in the side of the block, I sold it for pretty good profit and I went about bought a TR6.

I didn’t play much for that. I got that pretty cheap, but it was a great little car. I love it, and I drove that for a couple of years. I had so much fun. Can you imagine a college student driving a TR6 around. I was like the man around town.

SAMA: Wire wheels, no doubt.

TEMPLIN: No, it had the standard ones with the holes in it, but the 15-inch Red Line Michelin tires. Factory roll bar. It was a really cool car. I loved that car. I had that car for two years. Then I was in the building where my wife lived -- we weren’t married at the time -- and we were sitting around talking and all of a sudden we hear this massive crash and all the windows in the building break. There was a hailstorm. I grew up in Missouri and went to the University of Central Missouri, and the building windows were crashing. All I could think about was my car sitting out front.

As soon as it stopped, I ran out to my car. The top was shredded, and there was ice on the floorboards of my car. I thought, “Oh, my car.” But the insurance company paid to replace the top and repaint the whole thing, and I sold it for a two-thousand dollar profit. I drove it for two years and made two-thousand dollars on it! All of a sudden, I thought, this is a pretty good business. I like this business.

I also grew up in a household with a very mechanical dad. My dad was a mechanic his whole life and became a service manager for a construction equipment dealership and I worked on cars from the time I was a little kid. I worked on cars myself. So I go off to play football and “Oh, my god. What am I going to study?” It just so happened the school I went to had an automotive technology program, so I studied automotive technology.

SAMA: What school was this?

TEMPLIN: University of Central Missouri. Back in those days it was called Central Missouri State. They renamed the school since.

So it was a good program. How I got in the industry was I got my degree and left school and got a job working in the engineering department of a diesel distributor, an English company that designed diesel engines and I would design applications for these engines and generators and pumps and all kinds of different equipment -- concrete saws and everything else.

All of a sudden GM is calling wanting to know if I would come for an interview. They had found out about me through school. It just so happened the head of service for Pontiac Division of General Motors happened to down and visit the dealer that was in the town where I went to school and the dealer was really involved with the community and the school. He wanted to show off the technology complex that was built at the university. So he took him over there and the guy found out about me from the instructors, so they wanted to contact me.

I went to an interview with them and they wanted to hire me, but  there was a hiring freeze on. He just talked to me every month for a few months and all of a sudden Oldsmobile Division had openings they had to fill in a certain amount of time and he recommended me to his counterpart at Oldsmobile. So I went for an interview for the regional service manager for Oldsmobile in that part of the country.

They said during the interview they would probably send me to Michigan for a management training program and that didn’t sound so great to me. I was living in Kansas City getting ready to get married and going to graduate school to get my master’s degree. Basically, the salary range they gave me wasn’t all that exciting, and I thought why would I give up everything to go to that. Two days later I get a phone call -- I was walking out the door to go to work and had one foot out the door when the phone rings -- and I turned around and went back to answer the phone. It was the administrative assistant for the person who ran all of Oldsmobile’s service operations in Lansing, Michigan. She said she would like to fly me to Michigan for an interview.  I said I was on my way out the door to work and can I call you back. She said, “Well, there are plane tickets waiting for you at the airport and we made hotel reservations.” I’m a 22-year-old kid and I’m like, “Yeah, sure.”

I called my secretary at work and told her, “Hey, I’m sick for the next two days. Cover for me” and I fly to Michigan he gives me a job right there. He says “You’re not going to learn anything in the management training program. We have a district for you right there in Kansas City. You can start right there. Here’s the company car, the salary, blah, blah, blah.” So I took the job.

I worked the Kansas City zone office for about nine months and they came to me and said, “Hey, we’d like for you to switch from your district service manager’s job to district sales manager job. What would you think about that?” I kind of said, can I think about because I’d never even thought about that. I had done everything technical my whole life and I loved what I was going. Sales? I had to think about. In 48 hours, they came back and said, “We either want to move you into sales or we want to promote you. We’re moving you to L.A.” So they transferred me to Los Angeles.

It was ironic because I had covered a district in eastern Kansas and a corner of southwestern Missouri and called on 43 dealers. I moved to L.A. and I picked up a district of five dealers that did  hundred times the volume of the 43 dealers. It was just amazing.

I did several jobs in L.A. and they kept trying to get me to come to Michigan and I kept talking them out of it, and they kept giving me promotions without me going to Michigan. A young guy living in California didn’t want to go to Michigan. So they transferred me to San Francisco and it just so happened that at the time they transferred me to San Francisco Lexus had come and tried to hire me away.

In the early days of Lexus they didn’t want to take a whole bunch of people away from Toyota. We didn’t know if Lexus was going to be a success. It was a big gamble, to tell you the truth, in the early days. So they wanted people with luxury and near-luxury experience, and they hired some of use from Buick and Oldsmobile and they hired some Audi folks, BMW folks, Mercedes folks. That had few core people from Toyota, but most of us came from outside the organization. You don’t just grow it by taking people away from Toyota.

SAMA: You made the shift from service to sales. As you look at the future what is the biggest demand going to be.

TEMPLIN: The biggest problem we in the industry have right now is hiring enough engineers. Getting engineers is going to be one of the biggest challenges we face as a industry. We all have too few engineers and need more. So, if you have a kind that wants a good job and has a good mathematical base and like that kind of stuff, have them go become engineers because there will be plenty of jobs for them. Every kind of engineer. Mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, industrial engineers, engineering period.

SAMA: Doesn’t anybody want to do that?

TEMPLIN: There are probably fewer kids going into engineering, mathematics, the sciences, educational programs. It’s a global issue. There’s a global shortage of engineers. There’s a lot of computer engineers in India and things like that, but there’s not as many mechanical engineers and electrical engineers.

SAMA: Is there a lack of people who want to get into design?

TEMPLIN: I think that that market it’s easier to find those people. There are a lot people who want to do those kinds of things. The people who train automotive designers, those schools are growing right now. They have no shortage of students at those schools. There are lots of people who want to do that.

Other comments:

On the impact overall sales volume: “Overall volume in a lot of ways is not the best thing in the world for us. You end up becoming a victim of your own success at some point if you try to sell too much volume. It hurts residual values if you’re not careful and manage your business properly. As I told this story the other night about a friend of mine, a neighbor, who wanted to buy a luxury SUV and came over to knock on my door just to tell me she wasn’t going to buy an RX. “I just wanted to let you know I’m going to buy a luxury SUV and I’m not going to buy an RX.” I go, “OK, I’ll bite. Why?” She says “Well, they look really great, but there are so many of them out there I don’t want to be like everybody else. I want to have something different.” I say, “OK, fair enough.” So she goes out and shops and two weeks later in her driveway is an RX. I go over and ask her what happened, and she says “Well, I shopped everybody. I looked at Mercedes and BMW and Volvo and Cadillac and everybody else, but before I could buy, I wanted to find out why everybody drove an RX. So I went and test drove one and I immediately knew why everybody bought it. It was the best product, the best value, had the most features, ride, and handling, so I bought it.” But it pointed out you can get too big if you don’t manage your business properly and then it’s not special, in our segment of the market. I don’t think that’s true in what Toyota is trying to do in the mass market. Volume is a good thing for them. But volume is not always a good thing for a luxury brand.

On building customer loyalty: Right now in the luxury segment Lexus has the highest loyalty at just over 60 percent. The last report I saw said we had 63 percent and the next closest was 58 or 59 percent loyalty. Most luxury brands are pretty high. Mercedes is high and BMW is right behind them. Cadillac has been pretty low but I expect that to change dramatically. I expect it to change because when you’re at 34 percent it has to come up and when you have better products, you are going to keep some of those people. So you’ll naturally see it climb pretty quickly. But Audi and Cadillac are much, much lower than the Big Three in the luxury segment.

On the likely No. 1 competitor for Lexus in the future: I don’t think you can isolate any one competitor as being the strongest. I think you’re going to see Lexus, Mercedes, and BMW continue to be strong in the marketplace. They’re all great brands and will have a good following of people and will always maintain. Growth in the industry will start to be picked up by a lot of others players. There are a lot of good products in the marketplace that will appeal to different people. So you’ll see Hyundai pick up some business, you’ll see Audi continue to do well, you’ll see Acura come back. They’re not going to go away. Infiniti is coming with good product. The advantage that Infiniti has over some other brands, much like Lexus, is it has a good reputation for customer care. The brands that will succeed ultimately will be the people that have good product and also can deliver the customer experience. Luckily, we have a small number of dealers who have bought into that and really do a good job of it. We only have 229 Lexus dealers in the country. We actually have only 153 dealers who have 229 outlets. So we have 153 partners who really believe in the culture that we wanted to create in the beginning. That’s really valuable.