Our six month sales by brand chart is a bit crowded, so we’ve broken out luxury brands for today’s COTD. Bloomberg assembled a grip of analysts who all say that Mercedes is going to sock it to Lexus this year… and this chart certainly proves that the opportunity is there. But then, the opportunity is there for BMW too, if Lexus so much as stops for a breath. One thing is for certain though: Ford may be ruling the mass market, Lincoln is the last stop before Volvo-ville as you work your way down the luxury volume ranking. That’s not great, but given a choice between a respectable luxury brand and a $2.6b first-half profit, I know what nine out of ten auto executives recommend.

The automotive world largely yawned when Ford announced the 2011 Lincoln MKZ hybrid. After all, Ford already offered the Fusion and Mercury Milan in hybrid flavor, and the standard MKZ is hardly setting the world on fire with only 11,214 models sold in the first half of 2010. In search of a bigger publicity bump for its luxury hybrid, Ford has pulled a fun little gimmick out of its bag of tricks: the 2011 MKZ will offer a hybrid drivetrain for no price premium over the standard V6 version [press release here]. According to the AP [via Yahoo], this is the first time a manufacturer has offered hybrid and non-hybrid versions of the same car for the same price. And really, the move comes as no huge surprise. With Mercury on its way out, Ford doesn’t have to worry about the$35,180 MKZ Hybrid encroaching on the $32k Milan Hybrid, and if it had charged a hybrid premium, the MKZ hybrid could have cost closer to $40k where it would have faced tougher competition from better-established luxury brands. Besides, Lincoln needs to build some momentum somehow… but is value a good place to start rebuilding a worn-down luxury brand?

Automotive News [sub] reports that the Acura RL is about to be canceled in the Japanese market, where it is sold as the Honda Legend. Considering that Acura’s range-topper sold only 872 units this year so far. For comparison, that’s less than even its weakest competitors like the Cadillac STS (2,145 units YTD)… only the Audi A8 (353 units YTD) sells worse in the full-size luxury sedan segment. According to the report, which originated in The Nikkei, Honda will also make its Civic a hybrid-only model in Japan, and will cancel its Elysion 8-passenger van. With Honda announcing its mid-term product plans next week, we’re sure to hear more about this shortly… in the meantime, would anyone miss the RL?

Once upon a time, luxury cars were defined by giant drop-top land barges like Cadillac’s V-16 or the Bugatti Royale. Somewhere along the way, the luxury sedan-turned-convertible has fallen out of favor with the glaring exception of one of the world’s most expensive cars: the Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead. But now, having pioneered the four-door coupe and (coming soon) the five-door coupe, Mercedes-Benz’s endless search for “new” segments has it looking backwards to the good old days of massive top-down touring luxury.

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This segment is another big one, representing a number of four-door sedans that are either larger than another same-brand, D-Segment offering (i.e. Impala, Maxima), or a premium or “junior luxury” sedan. That throws cars as diverse as the Charger and the BMW 3-Series into the same segment, and though less than perfectly-focused, it makes for some interesting comparisons. Take, for example, the fact that the 3-Series has sold better so far this year than the Charger. Or the fact that Acura’s divisive TL is selling considerably better than Hyundai’s white-bread Genesis. So much to learn…

One of these cars is two years old and has a base price of £19,365 in the UK (it is not sold in the US), while the other is brand-spankety new and starts at £88,325 in that same UK market (it arrives stateside this fall). Which is which? And, since this is an easy one for the crazy car-identification ninjas that prowl this site, is this much family resemblance good or bad for Mercedes?

Look at our overall June sales numbers, and it’s clear that Daimler beat BMW Group last month (with help from an estimated 11 Maybach sales). By brand though, BMW won the volume game by nearly 1,000 units, with Lexus about another 1,000 units behind Mercedes. In general though, things were good in the luxury sector last month. In terms of percentage, the three “backmarkers” of the luxury field made some of the most dramatic gains, with Porsche booming 137 percent, and Jag/Landie combining for a 53 percent increase. Full numbers post-jump.

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Our aim is to raise the Lotus brand equity back to its rightful place as it existed in the 1970s when it competed with the likes of Ferrari, Porsche or Aston Martin. Maintaining the unique Lotus DNA is crucial, but with more relevance, greater efficiency and even more sustainability than we have had in the past.

Possibly worried that SUVs are falling out of favor along with the dinosaur juice that keeps their desert kingdom afloat, Saudi Arabia is getting into the SUV business, with this Ghazal 1. Personally approved by King Abdullah, some 20,000 of these peculiarly-styled utes will be sold around the Gulf Region each year, according to Top Gear. The project started life as a Mercedes G-Wagen, which was re-skinned by students at King Saud University. Apparently the king was so impressed with the design (or just bored enough with his Escalade) that he approved the thing for production. Pricing, equipment and options are not available at the moment, but don’t expect the Ghazal 1 to do particularly well outside of the circle of Saudi Royal Family dependents. On the other hand, that is one hell of a market right there…

With Cadillac’s sales remaining stubbornly slack, the GM luxury rband is looking for every opportunity to win back customers. Image-conscious fashion victims have the CTS Coupe to coo over, but what about the Consumer Reports-reading luxury buyers who want a well-managed, hassle-free customer experience? Cadillac is trying to make inroads with these buyers as well, introducing a 4 year, 50,000 mile maintenance program for all 2011 model-year vehicles [full presser here]. The program includes

scheduled oil changes, tire rotations, replacement of engine and cabin air filters and a multi-point vehicle inspection

Sorry CTS-V drivers, but that doesn’t include free tires. And as much as we might like to laud Cadillac’s decision to back up its products, this move doesn’t really get them ahead of the game. Instead, Cadillac is only just keeping pace with the likes of BMW, which has offered a four-year, 50k mile scheduled maintenance program for some time. So now Cadillac can say that buyers who switch from BMW won’t be surprised by first-year maintenance costs, eliminating one possible frustration on the customer experience level. Still, this is hardly a perception-shifting, Hyundai Assurance-level gimmick for the luxury game. [Update: The BMW program does not include tire rotations. Standard Of The World after all?]

In the midst of a nearly 3,000 word InsideLine treatise on the forthcoming Equus and Hyundai’s upmarket intentions in general, Hyundai’s USA boss John Krafcik reveals that the car pictured above very nearly became the Hyundai Genesis. No, really.

There was a lot of internal debate on design direction for Genesis. We used a European design house as an early consultant, and its proposals informed the core design elements of the first approved exterior model, which got as far as the tooling stage. In our industry, when you’ve built tools to stamp the exterior sheet metal, you’ve committed millions of dollars, and so you’re pretty much committed at that stage to bring that design to market. But in the end, we weren’t happy with the design. So we made the right decision (albeit a difficult and expensive one) to redo the exterior with a cleaner, more athletic and more enduring design, homegrown from our own design studio.

I got one word for you Krafcik: ballsy.

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As Bertel put it when he first reported the newest Mercedes ad slogan, we are not making this up. How could we?

We’ve been pretty hard on Cadillac’s decision to replace its aging DTS/STS “flagships” with the stretched-Epsilon XTS, shown in concept form at this year’s NYIAS. We reckon Cadillac needs a true S-Class competitor (as opposed to a glorified Buick LaCrosse) to be taken seriously as a world-class luxury brand… and it turns out that Ed Whitacre agrees. C&D reports:

Cadillac fans will be thrilled to hear that Ed Whitacre himself has instructed the brand to build a true, full-size flagship above both the CTS and the upcoming XTS. The car has not been clearly defined yet. The Zeta platform (Holden Commodore, Chevrolet Camaro, etc.) is heavy and dated, and therefore the flagship is more likely be built on a stretched version of the CTS’s Sigma platform.

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TTAC Commenter Charles T writes in:

Any chance you could do $30-$40k entry-level luxury, ie BMW 3-series and everyone else gunning for a piece of that pie? For completeness sake, include cars that normally aren’t positioned against the 3-series despite being a similar price (Lexus ES and Lincoln MKZ, for example) just as a sense of their relative market sizes; I’d be curious to see how the sporty vs unsporty dichotomy plays out in the real world.

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