Car dealers are very happy the snow and ice have melted off their inventory. So were car buyers, who celebrated spring’s first full month by snapping up 1.45 million vehicles, a nearly five-percent jump from last year. We’ve focused this month’s sales analysis on the luxury segment, primarily because the new Macan is turning Porsche into a high-volume manufacturer that’s making other companies like Jaguar look as if they’re still hand-beating E-types on wood frames. Let’s have a look.
--
Porsche’s Best-Ever Month Takes a Thick Slice of Macan Pie
-In the air-cooled, pre-Boxster days of the early ’90s, Porsche was happy to sell a few hundred 911s each month and nothing more. While its 47,007-unit record for 2014 is no surprise, April’s 5217 tally was the company’s best month ever. Nearly one in three Porsche buyers drove off in a new Macan (or 1537 in total, another best-ever month since it went on sale last May). This makes the Cayenne’s coming redesign all the more crucial (only 236 more people opted for the original Porsche SUV over the Macan, and sales have been dropping since at least 2013). One final best-month-ever stat: Porsche sold 1206 certified used cars in April, a 19-percent jump over last year. Still prefer a 911? Come to Atlanta in a few months, when Porsche will make one of every 20 911 variants available for a track-day test drive at its sprawling new headquarters.
-New Volvos Are Now Rarer Than Porsches
-Volvo’s new marketing strategy of skipping auto shows and traditional advertising is looking dubious. Under Chinese command, Volvo has now managed to sell fewer cars in one month than Porsche, at just 4636. How we’ve gotten to this point is a question Volvo Cars CEO Håkan Samuelsson should be chewing over with his köttbullar. The new XC90 is a terrifically advanced car, with or without the Mars symbol and crossbar, but it’s the exception in an aging lineup. We’re at least two years away from a new Volvo compact crossover and a top-end S90, to say nothing of redesigns for the XC60 and S60. To catch up, Volvo has to remain the niche, quirky brand obsessed with outclassing the industry on safety. Volvo’s just-announced South Carolina plant with capacity for 100,000 cars a year—roughly double what it sold here in 2014—won’t do it any favors until the entire lineup gets sorted. Hot-rod Polestar wagons and three-seat limo concepts are fun in the meantime; they just don’t sell.
-BMW i Models Are Not Plug-in Duds
-
The electric i3, despite M5-level volume, is outpacing many non-premium electric cars that have been on the market much longer. BMW moved 406 in April—about a quarter the number of Nissan Leafs sold—yet zapped the Volkswagen e-Golf (309), Ford Focus Electric (124), Smart ForTwo Electric Drive (124), and Kia Soul EV (73). It’s true that BMW is disappointed with the model’s global sales, but when Toyota can only find a few dozen more homes for the Prius plug-in, the i3 is not a dud. Speaking of a few dozen, there aren’t any more BMW i8s in stock across the country. Inventory is so tight and the car so supermodel bitchin’ that many dealers are tacking $20,000 to $100,000 onto the i8’s $148,250 maximum MSRP. No dealer wants to touch BMW’s gas-electric hybrids of the 3, 5, and 7 variety, however, possibly because they only sold 22. For the entire year.
-We Keep Ignoring The Two Most Kick-Ass Cadillacs In Years
-We’ve raised this stumping question in our “10 Best Cars That Nobody Buys” list, and we’ll say it again. Why are the Cadillac ATS and CTS, still fresh and deserving of our many accolades, not killing it on the showroom floor? Their April numbers were awful, with the CTS down 47 percent to 1726 and the ATS sinking 23 percent to 2119. Year to date, they’re slumping just as badly. It’s a lesson that no matter how much good press an underrated car receives, consumers value brand image, and Cadillac doesn’t have that kind of swagger yet. CEO Johan de Nysschen admits he doesn’t expect Cadillac to outgun the established Germans for another decade or more, even if the world takes a long time to notice that every model is indeed world-class. Elsewhere in Caddyville, the April numbers looked promising, with a 14-percent overall gain. The best-selling SRX was up 41 percent, the fat-margin Escalade more than doubled, and even the plug-in ELR saw a year-over-year increase.
-A Reminder that Jaguar is Still Very Small, and the XK Is Now Very Irrelevant
-Since the F-type was hatched, the XK has had every right to be bitter. Those in the market for a Jaguar coupe or roadster are gunning straight for the hotter, smaller, and equally luxurious F-type, as seen by a near-tripling of its April sales to 274. With 2016 bringing all-wheel drive and a manual gearbox (although not in combination), it will only get worse for the XK, which managed only 43 sales (down 72 percent). After the summer months, we’d suggest bargaining an XK down by 10 grand or more. Especially in cold-weather states like ours, dealers will resent any rear-wheel-drive XKR as a sad lump of aluminum glued to their marble floors. They’ll be open to barter. While a Porsche dealer would laugh at such a bold tactic, Jaguar is a miniscule player in the luxury market with just 1079 cars sold last month (up four percent).
-Mercedes E-class Slows Down as CLA and C-class Pick Up Steam
-The all-conquering 2015 C-class has been taking the larger E’s thunder. The E-class, formerly the brand’s bestseller, is down by a third for the year and 43 percent in April. It now trails far behind the C-class, which was up 30 percent to 6665 sales for the month, compared to the E’s 3466. The E also appears to be in danger of dropping below the entry-level CLA, which is charging hard with a 70 percent gain to 2670 units. That explains why Mercedes is offering hefty rebate on 2015 and 2016 E-class models (up to $3500). The next E-class won’t bow until late 2016 at the earliest. Elsewhere in the lineup, the M-class posted a 29-percent increase to 4945, the CLS slipped to 539 units, and 205 people who are not any of our family or friends went home with an AMG GT. The Smart brand continues to slide—its 2008 glory days, when a miraculous 25,000 cars sold, seem like a long time ago—but as a whole, Mercedes-Benz is up 11 percent in the U.S. That bested the increases posted by BMW (seven percent) and Audi (eight percent), but not Lexus (12 percent) or Lincoln (20 percent). Lincoln does deserve a shoutout for its winning SUVs: The MKC more than doubled the GLK’s sales in April, the Navigator nearly doubled the GL, and even the MKX beat the ML by a few hundred. Mercedes could and should do better with these trucks.
--
- -
- The 10 Best Cars that Nobody Buys
- -
- Holy Bigfoot: You Have No Idea How Massive Toyota Truly Is
- -
- Sales of Huge-Dollar Luxury Cars Are Through the Roof—and Still Growing
- -
-
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1GZx9OK
via Agya
