Quote:
Originally Posted by crazybimmer
I cannot believe what I'm hearing or seeing here. it's almost as if the M division hired a bunch of geeks from NASA who think this is some sort of a smarta$$ high school contest. You know what I'm talking about, those dudes who know the first 300 digits of the PI. They want to build "cool" stuff? they can go to google and work for them, they like "cool", we on the other hand want power, we want a car that looks and feels dominant, we want cars that we can drive the shit out of in a TRACK.
enough said!
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No, if that was the case, BMW would actually have cool cars. Instead they hired a marketing guy as head of M, BMW has grown up and gone corporate. Now it's all about sales numbers, revenue must increase quarter after quarter, year after uear. Volume is in the driver seat now now. Car is only as good as needed to get more sales.
Ford is almost caught up. Lexus is almost caught up. Nissan has a flagship car BMW can't compete because as the marketing puts it, we are too good for that. (Right, you can only say that after you demonstrated you can decimate the opponent.) Funny how Nissan marketing don't even consider BMW as a competitor, they went straight for Porsche.
Quote:
Originally Posted by M3 Adjuster
Perhaps you should look at the sales volume? What you call "bs" is clearly highly profitable.
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Toyota and Lexus are highly profitable. Even surpassed the big 3 in domestic market couple years ago, why aren't you going gaga over one? And you prove my point, they care more about profitability, performance is an afterthought. It used to be produce an excellent car to drive sales. Now it's get a good enough car, use past allure and marketing to drive sales.
BMW should get out of car manufacturing all together. Sell the plants, lay off the workers to reduce fixed cost and variable cost. Instead get into industry with higher ROI, like software. Maybe it can use the BMW name to start a company like Groupon with explosive growth that makes starbucks looks like a tortise. Hell if they liquidated and long commodities last year they would probably be more profitable.
Why don't they do that? Because their core competency is building cars. If they lose that demise will shortly follow.