Selling luxury cars in a bad economy is a tough job, but BMW is doing so good of a job of it in the U.S. that the company is moving new cars originally slated to be sold in Europe to the U.S. BMW is changing the allocation of tens of thousands of cars to the United States from Europe. BMW’s U.S. sales have grown by 7.1 percent this year, while European sales have not done as well. With the European economy faltering Europe could see the single largest year-over-year sales drop in 19 years in 2012.
BMW will change the destination of the tens of thousands of vehicles to the U.S. thanks to the U.S. auto industry’s predicted sales growth of 1 million cars in 2012, up to 14 million.
BMW’s least expensive car is the 2013 BMW 128i, which starts at $31,200, not a cheap car, but BMW is still growing, showing that the U.S. economy might have more life than people are giving it credit for.
Carmakers are moving towards global cars, where the cars sold in Europe or Asia are identical to the ones sold in North and South America. This allows the carmaker to share engineering, styling and even production costs throughout the world rather than developing completely different cars that sell in the same segments all over the world. Ford’s new Focus and Fiesta are good examples of this. Where the last generation of the Focus differed from the European model, this generation is the same worldwide.
Source: USA Today.
