Photo: Daimler AG
Usually, car company head honchos are very restrained when talking publicly about their competitors or about failing predicted sales figures. Apparently, this is not the case with Daimler's epic moustache man, Chairman Dieter Zetsche.
“Mercedes-Benz probably won't win the luxury car sales in the United States this year. We won't play any games. I'm not sure that applies to our competition.” Zetsche has said, quoted by Automotive News.
This quote comes after the rather zany way in which the Stuttgart brand lost to BMW in 2012 on the US market. After being on top of the sales game for most of the last year, Mercedes lost on the last leg.
An article by the Wall Street Journal speculated at the time that BMW may not have played entirely fair with the numbers. The report was based on an internal BMW memo sent in July 2012 to its US dealers, offering them discounts ranging from $2500 to $7000 and being valid for a single day.
This would suggest that a number of US BMW dealers may have purchased an unknown number of “demo cars”, which are usually used for test drives or service loaners. Those cars would eventually get sold either as second hand or new, but they would be counted as sold by BMW the moment they arrived at the subsequent dealers.
Corroborated with Dieter's quote, this would imply that Mercedes-Benz is well aware of this “tactic”, and this is the reason why “they feel fine” with losing the yearly sale war on US soil.
Story via Automotive News and WSJ
This quote comes after the rather zany way in which the Stuttgart brand lost to BMW in 2012 on the US market. After being on top of the sales game for most of the last year, Mercedes lost on the last leg.
An article by the Wall Street Journal speculated at the time that BMW may not have played entirely fair with the numbers. The report was based on an internal BMW memo sent in July 2012 to its US dealers, offering them discounts ranging from $2500 to $7000 and being valid for a single day.
This would suggest that a number of US BMW dealers may have purchased an unknown number of “demo cars”, which are usually used for test drives or service loaners. Those cars would eventually get sold either as second hand or new, but they would be counted as sold by BMW the moment they arrived at the subsequent dealers.
Corroborated with Dieter's quote, this would imply that Mercedes-Benz is well aware of this “tactic”, and this is the reason why “they feel fine” with losing the yearly sale war on US soil.
Story via Automotive News and WSJ
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