BMW 1-Series gives Mercedes a Bavarian bashing

Newswheel staff :: 10 October 2005 :: Filed under BMW, Mercedes Benz, Europe & UK, US,

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Ultimate driving machine goes from strength to strength

BMW is not only selling more cars than its indigenous arch rival, Mercedes, it’s also enjoying more sales growth. So what’s doing the damage? The crappy quality of many recent Mercs? Yup. But that’s not all…
 
The simple story goes something like this: BMW sold 131,705 cars worldwide in September, up by 11.4 per cent on last year. Mercedes-Benz, meanwhile, managed 111,518 sales with year on year growth of  4.9 per cent.

The nitty gritty
The full story, of course, is a little more complicated. BMW’s growth came almost exclusively from BMW-branded cars (Mini sales were near enough flat). Cars with the Mercedes-Benz badge achieved an 8.4 per cent rise but overall results were dragged down by a piss poor performance at Smart – down by 20 per cent.

In total, BMW has sold an impressive 988,463 cars in the first nine months of 2005. But there’s a final twist in this tale: if you exclude the 1-Series, sales of the remaining BMW group vehicles as a whole are down.

For the record, Audi registered an 11.9 per cent increase for September.