The average price of a single car lags behind Mercedes-Benz by 83,000 yuan, why has BMW's brand power declined so seriously?

Electric cars point north

2024-06-02 17:15Published in Shandong

In the past two years, BMW's sales in China have actually been quite good.

BMW sold 825,000 new cars in China in 2023, up 4.2% year-on-year, higher than Mercedes-Benz's 765,000 and Audi's 729,000. From January to April 2024, BMW sold 233,000 units, also surpassing Mercedes-Benz's 230,000 units and Audi's 223,000 units.

However, judging from the actual transaction price, BMW has "jumped hard" in the past two years. According to the data of Sang Zhiwei, a member of the expert committee of the China Automobile Dealers Association, the weighted average transaction price of the BMW brand in 2022 will be 398,000 yuan, while that of Mercedes-Benz will be 461,000 yuan, a difference of 63,000 yuan; In April this year, the average price of Mercedes-Benz dropped to 434,000, and BMW dropped to 351,000 all of a sudden, a decrease of 47,000 yuan compared with 2022, and the gap with Mercedes-Benz came to 83,000, an increase of 20,000 yuan.

Considering that BMW discontinued the 1 Series in 2023, which lowered the average price, and at the same time, BMW raised the X 5, which was only launched in April 2022, and sold about 50,000 units in 2022, which is lower than the proportion in April this year.

In other words, if the impact of the 1 Series and X 5 cars is deducted, BMW's average transaction price is expected to drop by at least 60,000 yuan in the past two years. And since May, this trend is still accelerating, the recent 180,000 i 3 has been popular all over the network, and the lowest 3 series naked cars are less than 200,000.

Sun Shaojun, founder of Che fans, said on May 28, "BMW suddenly sent a letter to all dealer stores, and in view of the market background and the huge impact brought by domestic brands, it has decided to prescribe a number of large subsidy reduction policies for BMW 4 S stores." ”

It can be said that BMW's terminal price is still rapidly "diving", which means that BMW's brand power has been declining rapidly in the past two years, and the LOGO of "blue sky and white clouds" is becoming more and more unpremium.

So what happened in the past two years, BMW's brand power and premium ability have declined so badly?

The design deviates, and the cash cow 5 series is "lame"

In the last two years, BMW's design has been a bit of a mystery.

The first was the 7 Series, which began to use split headlights, and from here, many people were not very optimistic about BMW's design. In terms of sales, the sales of the BMW 7 Series in 2022 will be 14,532 units, and after the launch of the new generation 7 Series (December 2022), the sales of the 7 Series in 2023 will fall to 12,711 units, and this year, except for January, the monthly sales will not exceed 1,000 units.

However, the BMW 7 Series is not a volume model after all, and selling a little more and less will have little impact on BMW, and what really hurts is that the new generation of 5 Series directly "collapsed".

On January 25 this year, the new generation of 5 Series models was officially launched, but soon sales began to collapse, and sales did not exceed 5,000 units from February to April, while BMW 5 Series rarely sold more than 10,000 units a month before.

At present, no matter from which point of view, this generation of BMW 5 Series is generally considered to be "ugly", the headlights, especially the daytime running lights, are considered to be seriously regressed, and the hood is significantly taller than the old model, causing the front face to look complex and bloated, especially the sports package version. In addition, the side lines are not very harmonious, and the design of the side windows is a bit redundant. In the end, it was a very abrupt taillight, and the first time I saw it, I thought it was a Toyota Camry.

First of all, in terms of dimensions, the length, width and height of this generation of 5 Series standard axles are 5060/1900/1515 mm, which is 97 mm, 32 mm and 36 mm higher than the previous generation model, and the wheelbase is increased by 20 mm to 2995 mm. The length, width and height of the domestic long wheelbase version are 5175/1900/1520 mm, and the wheelbase is 3105 mm, which is 169 mm, 32 mm, and 20 mm longer than the previous generation 5 Series, respectively, with the same wheelbase.

It can be said that the current domestic 5 Series is already the size of a traditional D-segment car (the length of the new 7 Series has come to 5 meters 4), and it looks very bloated.

The source of this strange design is probably the design of BMW's "petrol-electric platform", this generation of BMW 7 Series and 5 Series are shared by the fuel version and pure electric version, which leads to the fuel 7 Series and 5 Series will also be affected by the i 7 and i 5.

In order to have better headroom, pure electric sedans generally move the A-pillar forward, and at the same time make the tail a slip-back shape, so as to ensure the headroom of the occupants as much as possible without increasing the height of the vehicle, such as the Xiangjie S 9 that has been on fire in the past two days.

The BMW 5 Series has to take care of the traditional styling of a gasoline car (or longitudinal rear-wheel drive) and meet the headroom of a pure electric model, so it can only make the vehicle higher, and in order to make the overall look more harmonious, it has to be lengthened and widened......

For consumers who spend four or five hundred thousand to buy medium and large sedans, in addition to the brand, it basically depends on the styling, and the BMW 5 Series has always been one of the pillars of BMW's sales and a "cash cow", and now with the collapse of the 5 Series, BMW's average price and profits are declining rapidly, which can be said to be a big injury.

In the new energy era, BMW's handling advantage is gone

Since April, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles has been hovering around 50%, which means that half of the people who buy cars now buy new energy vehicles, and this proportion will be even higher in the future.

In fact, BMW also knows the importance of new energy vehicles, and has long released the 5 series plug-in hybrid model 530 Le, which once sold very well, but later because of the large-scale failure of hybrid components, many owners have risen up to "crusade" BMW in the face of sky-high maintenance costs.

The plug-in hybrid road did not work, BMW began to increase the number of pure electric vehicles, so it launched the domestic iX 3 and i 3, of which the i 3 is unique to China, and the iX 3 is sold back to Europe.

But the ending is not satisfactory, although the two cars in the joint venture sold quite well, but it is a "price fracture" in exchange, the two cars began to sell soon began to play 8% or even 7% off, recently has come to 5-6 discounts, it can be said that the brand power of BMW is selling cars, the more you sell, the more you lose, and it will damage the brand image.

BMW's electric car is called "miscellaneous electric vehicle" by netizens, the fundamental reason is that the logic of electric vehicles and fuel vehicles is completely different, in the era of fuel vehicles, BMW's engine + ZF 8 AT gearbox is a perfect match, coupled with 50:50 front and rear weighting, the handling does have a lot of advantages, but in the era of electric vehicles, horsepower, ride these have become very cheap, BMW's advantages in the era of fuel vehicles can not be translated to electric vehicles at all.

Coupled with BMW's "oil-electric sharing" body, compared with many native pure electric architectures, it is inherently at a disadvantage in many aspects, such as the ZEEKR 007, Zhiji L 6 and other re-handling aspects are obviously much more extreme than the BMW i 3.

Intelligence is the last straw that overwhelms BMW

Of course, BMW also has its own native all-electric platform, the Neue Klasse, which will be launched in 2025, which is still very attractive from the current concept car.

I believe that BMW will be significantly better than now in terms of battery life, power, and handling on the new platform, at least compared with these domestic manufacturers, the gap is not so big, but what is more terrible for BMW is not the electrification in the first half, but the intelligence in the second half.

With 13,391 deliveries of the M9 and 6,695 of the BMW X 5 in April, the M9 has almost doubled its sales and orders for the M9 are increasing rapidly.

The core advantage of the M9, which has an average transaction price of 560,000 yuan, can begin to crush the BMW X 5 is intelligence.

The author has an F 10 old 5 series at home, and I have also experienced several BMW cockpits, although this iDrive system is not bad in the joint venture car, but compared with the current smart electric car is like an "antique". First of all, ask the world M 9, shout "Xiaoyi, Xiaoyi" most of the functions on the car are used, in addition, the world M 9 also supports ten-screen linkage, every passenger in the body can use a good experience, and BMW's set is good for the driver, the knob is used to using it is not bad, but other passengers in the car basically have no experience at all.

Finally, there is a trench that BMW is difficult to cross is intelligent driving, this actually does not need to explain anything, Huawei's ADS 3.0 automatic driving system is used by many car owners, there are a lot of small videos, many cities have begun to support urban NOA, and the maximum effective speed of AEB has also reached 150 km/h.

This is BMW is also a lifeline for the entire European automobile industry, after Nokia was acquired by Microsoft, there is no company that can play in Europe in the entire mobile Internet era, and there are not many related IT talents, Germany and even the whole Europe are "far behind" in terms of intelligence, and the gap between China and the United States will only get bigger and bigger.

The Chinese market accounts for about one-third of BMW's global market, and it has amortized its R&D costs and brought very substantial profits to BMW over the past decade or two, but from the perspective of 2024, BMW's one-third of the pie is in jeopardy. If BMW still wants to keep this one-third of the market, it might as well put the R&D center of electric vehicles in China, and cooperate with Chinese car companies in the field of intelligence, such as using Huawei's cockpit and intelligent driving, maybe there is still a glimmer of life.

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