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As I speculated a few months ago:
1. BMW is in the process of trying to double its global production in this decade. Half of the total output will be FWD! (due partly to regulatory requirement on fuel economy)
2. As much as the management putting on a brave face, do they really want to bet the farm (BMW brand itself) on the fickle consumers not caring which end of the car drives the vehicle? As I explained, even if the trend-followers buying up the low end volume products don't care as much, it is the trend-setters writing the reviews and blogs that influence the decisions . . . and those trend-setters care very much about which axle drives the test cars!
3. If we get another snowy winter like last year (albeit not this year's freakishly warm winter), the snow belts in Europe and North America (and soon China and Russia) need FWD midsize to large cars. AWD is nice, but over-reliance would get the company killed on CAFE mandates.
4. Saab offers an excellent antidote to Audi, in terms of market positioning.
People misunderstand the problem with GM. It was never the multitude of brands per se; the Afred Sloan system of having multiple brands targeting different core audience did very well against Ford, wrestling industry leadership from Ford and kept it for more than half a century. The problem with GM later was that, due to union labor cost disadvantage (and bean counters having to cut corners to compensate), the company steadily lost market share since the 80's, and that led to the various brands making the SAME CAR! That's what made the brands superfluous and redundant.
For a growing company, having a growing portfolio of brands makes very good sense. Both Toyota and VW have been doing that. So did both Ford and GM in their growth days. In the last few years, BMW has laid the ground work for realizing economy of scale without sharing entire platforms: i.e. various parts and components can be shared across cars riding on different platforms. If the market embraces Saab with "BMW inside," with all the connotations of engineering expertise (of both BMW and SAAB) and deep pockets (of BMW, obviously), the new SAAB division within BMWAG portfolio can really take off, just like Mini did on a much smaller physical scale (and potential sales volume scale too, because after all, FWD midsize car is the meat of the automobile market).
posted by 75.67.1...
, Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:06:25
, Tue, 21 Feb 2012 08:27:11, Tue, 21 Feb 2012 08:40:25, Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:19:50
, Tue, 21 Feb 2012 07:39:46, Tue, 21 Feb 2012 08:02:55
, Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:54:15, Thu, 23 Feb 2012 07:11:16, Tue, 28 Feb 2012 09:37:15, Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:56:53, Thu, 23 Feb 2012 21:27:00
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