View Single Post
      07-31-2019, 09:31 AM   #96
secretanchitman
Banned
United_States
766
Rep
554
Posts

Drives: 2020 F82 M4 6MT
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Chicago, IL

iTrader: (0)

Garage List
Quote:
Originally Posted by mkoesel View Post
If the data says that's what the populace wants, then it is a market worth pursuing. The situation is no different from a four-door coupe version of a passenger car.

It is not typically a successful business strategy to notice that a new idea (be it your own or a competitor's) is bringing in new customers, shake your head at the new and peculiar buyer behavior at play, and then decide to opt out of this new market that has opened up because it does not align with some contrived and arbitrary dogmatic principle.



But renaming products will likely lead to no reduction in costs and does nothing to address those that are not selling well. I understand you are also reducing the number of models, but you do not need to rename anything to achieve that.

Although there is no data available, I would suggest that the adoption of even-numbering for coupes/convertibles/Gran Coupes and the M Performance branding has not hurt revenue. In fact, the latter in particular is almost surely generating more revenue than would be otherwise available. We know that the M name brings clout and luxury vehicle buyers tend to place a lot of value on brand, thereby opening up opportunity for higher pricing. In any case, certainly spending money (it would be a significant amount) to roll things back would be a mistake at this stage.

Regarding model reduction, once we rid the lineup of the GT's, minivans, and other oddities that didn't catch on, coupes and convertible are obvious low hanging fruit, no doubt to the dismay of enthusiasts. The good news? It turns out you can make a passenger car with four doors perform identically to one with two doors in the case where they sit on the same architecture, have the same dimensions, and share chassis components. The thing is that the SUV form factor is the new default choice for the typical buyer, so you no longer need to take the rear doors off a sedan to make a statement with your passenger car. Merely driving a passenger car *period* is the new way to make a statement, like it or not. And so, the demand to have those rear doors nixed is slowly fading.
I agree - if people want/gravitate towards a certain type of model then by all means. BMW should have capitalized on hybrids and electric but they squandered their lead IMO.

Renaming products might not reduce costs but it will simplify their lineup. Mercedes used to have different models (E/CLK, S/CL, GLK, ML) but now it’s all same. Audi still keeps it separate but that’s another story!

I totally get why M Performance is a thing because more M models means more sales of higher end models (not full M cars but right underneath). It is easy to make more models based on the same platform with minimal risk/low cost so I get why BMW does this.

I still would like the lineup trimmed down regardless of sales and ease of building off a platform.
Appreciate 0