Didn’t BMW make noises that they “want to be the number 1 luxury carmaker in the United States by 2012?“ If that’s still the case, then the boys from Bavaria better get their act together. Currently, they don’t look so good. In the March 2010 sales round-up, they came in with a measly 3 percent growth, while the market grew 24 percent. Then, as Automotive News [sub] points out, there is a dark horse: (Read More…)

Shanghai is gearing up for the Expo 2010, which is supposed to drive millions of visitors to the sprawling Chinese metropolis from May through October. The whole city is being refurbished. Shanghai’s Hongqiao airport received a spanking new terminal. Shanghai’s Finest don’t want to be left behind. (Read More…)

BMW has filed trademark registrations for a series of new car names. According to reports, the names registered include i1, i2, i3, i4, i5, i6, i7, i8, i9 and E1, E2, E3, E4, E5, E6, E7, E8, E9. The M50d, Urbanic, Gran Coupe, Compactive, and Compactive Tourer names were also filed.

Autocar reports on fresh brand-equity casualties in BMW’s battle for mainstream territory. According to our sophisticated car name evaluation system, “Compactive Tourer” is the only moniker in this bunch that comes close to making the cut. But hey, it’s better than naming sub-1-Series BMWs after fractions. Or worse.

2009 was a great year for China’s auto makers with a record growth of 45 percent that propelled the market to 13.6 million units and gave it unassailable #1 status. It wasn’t all roses for everybody. For China’s Brilliance, joint venture partner of BMW, 2009 was downright rotten. (Read More…)

While the autoblogosphere frets bout whether BMW drivers can tell which wheels drive their cars, the real news in the BMW-goes-FWD storyline is the impact that the sea change in brand strategy is expected to have on volume. Automotive News [sub] reports that BMW is developing a new family of modular gas and diesel engines, which are intended “primarily for BMW’s new front-wheel-drive architecture, but the powerplants also will be used in the automaker’s rear-wheel-drive cars,” according to CEO Norbert Reithofer. And the volume at which this new family of three, four and six-cylinder engines will be produced is one of the early indications of where BMW is going with its FWD expansion. Today, BMW sells just under 1.3m vehicles worldwide. That’s fewer cars than will be powered by this new family of engines alone, which Reithofer says will motivate 1.5m vehicles worldwide. Considering BMW’s goal is to sell 2m vehicles of all its brands by 2020, it’s clear that much of that growth will be made possible by new FWD-inclusive drivetrain technology.
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Debates over the relative values of front-, rear- and all-wheel-drive have raged for as long as automotive enthusiasm has existed, and after decades of argument, the only thing that anyone seems to agree on is that the the drive wheels matter. But do they? According to Automotive News Europe [sub]’s Luca Ciferri,

More proof that customers don’t care about the difference between rwd and fwd came last week when BMW revealed that 80 percent of its 1-series owners believe the car is fwd

Ciferri wrote this in the “blog” section of the Automotive News [sub] website, and didn’t link to any sources to back his claim up. Meanwhile, a search of German news sources has failed to pull up stories that link to a source other than Ciferri’s blog post. Though Ciferri is a respected auto journalist, and we hesitate to accuse him of making this stuff up, there’s a definite chance that this study isn’t all that it seems. After all, Ciferri cites BMW’s research at a time when the Bavarians are developing the first ever FWD car to carry the famed BMW roundel. Though we don’t doubt that many BMW 1-series buyers might not know which wheels drive their cars, the 80 percent number seems suspiciously high. Furthermore, Ciferri doesn’t indicate whether that statistic reflects global customers, European buyers, or the American market. Combined with BMW’s obvious incentives to de-stigmatize front wheel drive, these problems leave us little choice but to take Ciferri’s statistics with a hefty grain of salt.

As the avid reader of our cop car chronology and our on-going coverage of crime-buster conveyances knows, that market of 75,000 units a year in the U.S.A. alone is in a bit of a turmoil. The Crown Vic, holder of approximately 70 percent of the fuzz market, is about to be retired. Ford, GM, and Chrysler want to get a bite out of that crime-driven market. Not to forget a little known company, curiously and politically incorrectly named “Carbon Motors.”  Since our own Sajeev Mehta directed our attention towards Carbon, it got a little quiet around the formerly Atlanta, now Connersville, Ind. based upstart that wants to build dedicated police-mobiles. Until today. (Read More…)

The NYTimes reports that Norbert Reithofer, CEO of BMW AG, is thinking the unthinkable. Dr Reithofer said at a shareholders’ meeting in Munich: “We are exploring the possibility of developing a joint architecture for the front and four-wheel drive systems of these cars,” WHAT?! An FWD BMW? An act against nature. Say it isn’t so! He didn’t. (Read More…)

Andy writes:

Sajeev, I enjoy your posts on TTAC and I wanted to ask a quick lease negotiation question. Currently BMW has very good lease rates on their 5 series models. Is there a smart way to renegotiate the 10k mile/year limit? That just seems like a lot of money for 10k miles per year.

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BMW and Daimler don’t really like each other. As Herr Baron Schmitt put it, “Daimler engineers view their colleagues as boorish Bavarian upstarts. BMW engineers think Daimler is a congregation of has-beens”. Bluntly speaking, there’s no love lost between them. Which makes the following news that much sweeter to the “Bavarian upstarts”. And which makes the has-beens gnash their teeth. (Read More…)

Risky business. That defines the car business, and never more succinctly so than in the case of this car. Rarely has a desperate last-minute gamble paid of so handsomely as the “Neue Klasse” BMWs. Today’s new owners of Saab can only dream (hallucinate) about turning their business around so quickly and definitively as this BMW did. But  having the guts and money to back the risk taking is only part of the equation. Most of all, it’s a matter of being at the right time with the right product, and having the smarts to recognize it. In 1962, the seemingly impossible wasn’t. Today? Good luck. (Read More…)

A couple of weeks ago, TTAC reported how Dieter Zetsche was re-elected as CEO of Daimler for another 3 years. In that article we mentioned the many challenges that face him. Mainly, how to make Daimler sustainably profitable. Size matters in the auto business. An unattached Daimler has a hard time achieving the economies of scale someone like say Audi or Lexus can. So unless Daimler fancies being taken over (and we all know Daimler likes to be on top in any tie-up) it’ll have to form partnerships and joint ventures to get those cost savings Daimler needs. The big arranged wedding between BMW and Daimler isn’t going anywhere. Instead, Daimler announced that it had formed a partnership with Renault to produce the new generation Smart car. Then, Daimler announced it had formed a partnership with BYD to develop an electric car for the Chinese market. Now Daimler is trying to form a new partnership to achieve massive cost savings: A partnership with the tax payer. (Read More…)

We’ve seen photos of the refreshed BMW 3-Series coupe and convertible, but shots of the sedan have proven somewhat more elusive. Luckily TTAC has eyes everywhere. Commenter dinu01 spied this updated 3-Series testing near Toronto. “Both front and rear emblems are taped,” he reports. “The driver did not want to be photographed and went between 150-160 km/h.” Have a spy shot of your own? Share it with our contact form, and we’ll share it with TTAC’s readers.

The Geneva Auto Show is a great place to rub elbows, show concept cars, and plant or shoot down rumors.  BMW yesterday dismissed the view that premium carmakers would have to consolidate. This here is in the latter category.

BMW CEO Norbert Reithofer said that BMW would not merge with Daimler. Or anybody else for that matter. Now who had that crazy idea? Apparently, it’s going around. (Read More…)

BMW has ditched its long-running “Ultimate Driving Machine” tagline in favor of the vague, lifestyle-y “We Make Joy” promise. And though advertisers never tire of explaining that products themselves pale in comparison to the feelings they inspire in their owners, much of BMW’s (and most German luxury brands’) appeal comes from a projection of sachlichkeit, or single-minded obsession with something for its own sake. “The Ultimate Driving Machine” expressed the brand’s practical and emotional values in a simple, original phrase. The new line might open the brand to more non-enthusiast consumers, but it also reeks of the kind of marketing done by firms that don’t have top notch products on the market (usually because of a distinct lack of institutional sachlichkeit). For the closest analogue we could find on short notice, hit the jump.
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