March 2011 Sales Thread
04-21-11, 11:51 AM
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Luxury Sales Article
Can Lexus regain its sales lead again over Mercedes-Benz and BMW? Lexus' U.S. sales chief Mark Templin sounds sure of it -- and not just because of the brand's more aggressive new look.
Templin says that dramatic changes sweeping the auto industry favor Lexus. In particular, tougher fuel-economy standards are going to force BMW and Mercedes-Benz to roll out compacts and subcompact luxury cars. Not only will that be a distraction from their core, larger vehicle businesses, he reasons, but the rivals have to figure out how to get their well-heeled customers to accept smaller vehicles.
Sure enough, Mercedes unveiled the smallest car it has ever shown in the U.S., the cool little A-Class concept, and BMW is working on its own vehicle that could share a chassis with sister brand Mini.
Lexus, Templin says, doesn't have that problem. Becuase unlike the others, Lexus is owned by Toyota, which can cover the brand's small-car issues.
Both BMW and Mercedes executive dispute the theory. BMW's North American boss Jim O'Donnell says his brand won't have any trouble developing small cars while continuing to deliver the big ones for which the brand is known. "We 're not interfering with the resources devoted to bigger cars," he says. And he says BMW customers are significantly younger than those of Lexus.
Mercedes North American chief Ernst Lieb doesn't think that his brand will have any trouble maintaining its momentum while marketing cars as small as the A-Class, which isn't much bigger than a Ford Fiesta or Honda Fit. Detractors didn't think Mercedes could successfully launch the C-Class a few years ago, its current smallest car, but it did and car became a hit. In fact, it developed an immediate following as the "baby Benz."
One thing is clear: we're all going to have a lot more small luxury cars flooding the market.
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