Brand Perception of Quality

[alonsof1fan91]

Margin per car simply reflects their relative price position within the market place...

Ferrari - Only produce very expensive cars
Porsche - Primarily produce expensive cars
BMW/Audi/Mercedes - Primarily produce upper mass market cars

If your product range is primarily lower volume £75k-£100 cars (like Porsche), you're going to make much more margin/unit than BMW/Audi/Merc selling high a high volume of c.£30k 1/3 series, A3/4 and A/C Classes.

BMW/Audi/Merc will make a pile of cash on their halo cars, but these make up a tiny percentage of their total volume.

You miss understood me. I was comparing only Audi/BMW/Merc. That remark about Porsche was about the pile of cash they make with Cayennes etc

Their model range is nearly identical, yet Merc makes alot less on average then BMW.
I guess this is because Smarts seems to be listed together with MB in this list. If not I think Merc (eventhough all 3 have similar priced cars) just operates with lower margins, maybe to improve their brand reception by using more expensive materials (Merc has done terrible compared to BMW with important cars as the E Class in recent years). I can't imagine BMW's vehicle development and production to be so much superior to MB's to result in such a high gap. Maybe its just a mixture of all three points

 

[MatskiMonk]

@Stotty @alonsof1fan91

I think the share ownership and corporate structure of Audi, BMW and Mercedes will have some baring on their publicised profitability. Audi is probably in the 'best' position since it only reports to VW (99%), and technology can shift up or down within the group (Skoda, Seat, VW, Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini)... as well as being able to ammortise R&D costs across a much broader range of models.

 

[Grayfox]

Where are the french cars in that list or are they not classed as cars but a waste of money or garbage piles?

 

[Tornado]

They are classed "not sold in the US in 30 years."

 

[Imari]

They are classed "not sold in the US in 30 years."

Do they really not sell Renault, Peugeot and friends in the US? Seems odd, there's a lot of really average and really awful cars in their lineups, but there's a few gems in there that it's a shame to miss out on.

I remain annoyed that Renault wasn't selling in Australia during the Clio V6 era, so I can't have a mental mid-engined hot hatch.

 

[Tornado]

Do they really not sell Renault, Peugeot and friends in the US?

Citroen was gone before Richard Nixon was. The only reason you would buy one was because of how innovative and interesting they were; which legally wasn't allowed in the United States at the time.

Renault basically bought AMC in the early 80s, then designed/funded their entire product line for the remainder of the decade. In addition to bankrolling the development of the Cherokee/Grand Cherokee/Wrangler, they built a state of the art factory, filled it with the best people they could possibly find, and designed a midsized car that would have taken the fight directly to the Taurus while GM was still 3 years away from replacing the Celebrity. It was a critical darling that was highly anticipated when it finally released. Then the Renault CEO was assassinated by communists so they sold the entire thing to Chrysler in 1987 just to get rid of it; who took that huge talent, modern equipment and more than competitive platform and built almost their entire 1990s lineup off of it (to GM's ultimate downfall, considering how disastrous the Lumina was). Or, in the case of Jeep, just kept building the cars which were easily better than anything the competitors had largely unchanged and watched the money roll in (before Mercedes stole all of it).

Peugeot technically sold cars in America into the 1990s just like Alfa (I think they even left the same year), but I'm fairly certain Ferrari sold more cars annually (literally) by the time Peugeot just gave up so the only issue with them is "why is this car harder to find parts for than a Mondial?"

 

[JMoney]

Smart cars... haha. I'm surprised Toyota didn't top the list, as popular as they are. Nissan got creamed by its rivals.