Quote:
Originally Posted by David70
Would be interesting to put sales growth in two buckets "M" cars and non M cars. With more and more models becoming "M", I think the other group is dropping.
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You're right. Naturally some of those sales are taking a bite out of the non-M vehicle total. But, from the numbers, we can see it's a relatively small bite. The BMW brand achieved
2,028,659 sales in 2020. If we reasonably assume that, let's say, 43,000 of the M vehicles sold in 2020 were of the "high-performance" variety (what most here would deem "real M" vehicles), that means about 5% of total sales have switched from non-M to M.
That's nothing to sneeze at, but it is not unreasonable to suggest that ongoing brand growth - especially with new high volume model lines being added recently like the X7 and 2 Series Gran Coupe - could make up for that, even as we acknowledge some small portion of that growth was actually to the M brand in the M235i and X7 M50i/M50d. Obviously that growth wasn't realized in 2020 due to industry-wide decline from the ongoing pandemic. But once sales rebound, I think we'll see the addition of new models cover the loss of the "performance" vehicle sales statistics to the M brand.
Now, if we were to look at just US figures (unfortunately BMW does not generally share M sales by region), I'm sure the M total is far more than the ~7% (or whatever the exact number is) that the numbers reveal it is worldwide. This is because BMW does not offer their vast lineup of lower-end models in the US due to our tastes for higher powered vs. more efficient transportation, especially in premium segments.