January’s Sales Numbers Are In. Who Took The Volume Luxury Crown?

In the all out war for luxury auto sales numbers, there really are only 3 competitors at the top: Mercedes, BMW, and Audi. And in January, Mercedes took the crown.

It wasn’t even close actually. Mercedes destroyed BMW by posting 150,000 vehicles sold compared to 134,000. In fact, it’s BMW who’s in 3rd place in the race as it’s also been overtaken by Audi. Which is a bit of a surprise considering BMW was the luxury king last year.

Mercedes-Benz sold more than 150,000 luxury cars worldwide in January.

This represents a 20% jump in sales over the same month in 2015.

“We continued the positive development of record year 2015 in January, and started the new year successfully,” Mercedes-Benz Cars marketing and sales boss Ola Källenius said in a statement.

In the process, the three-pointed star overtook previous luxury sales king BMW which reported sales of 134,000 cars over the same period — an increase of 7.5%.

In fact, BMW was also overtaken by Audi which delivered more than 143,000 cars last month — an increase of 4%.

What’s most interesting is BMW’s response to this. Head of sales, Dr. Ian Robertson was cool and collected when talking about coming 3rd to the other two German giants.

“We are pleased to see the sustainable levels of growth we achieved in 2015 continuing into this year. Despite many markets showing continuing volatility, we remain optimistic that this positive trend will continue through 2016, our company’s centenary year.”

My guess is that BMW is kind of disappointed in this number, but not shaking in their boots yet. It is only January’s numbers after all. Though this must come as a bit of a blow to the ego considering they are always the ones to beat. Now that it’s happened after only 1 month, we’ll see if BMW can bounce back.

Someone go over 100 i8s to make them happy. Looking at you Mark Cuban.

(Source: Yahoo Autos)