Americans sure like buying them – again. Germans aren’t all that interested in them anymore, though (no more cash-for-clunkers).
Orders abroad are up 22 percent in May compared to a year earlier – with China and the United States providing the demand. We’ve been through this before, haven’t we (and again and again)?
“Die Bedeutung des US-Marktes nimmt wieder zu.”
Boy are they ever making gaudy BMWs these days.
I want one.
The car is a BMW M3 GT2 racecar that will compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans from June 12-13.
Mit einem blauen Auge davongekommen (getting out of the econmic crisis with just a black eye), German automobile locust types now have their other eye clearly focused on US-Amerika and plan to produce even more of their fancy schmancy Germerican cars there.
Actually, they’ve been doing this quite some time already and doing it quite well, thank you. They’ve continually increased their share of the American Automobile Market Pie these past five years and now enjoy a healthy 7.3 percent piece of it. And believe it or not, the American auto market is still the biggest in the world, although I wouldn’t know why. Or you wouldn’t think so these days, I mean.
Or could it be that German auto makers just want to get the hell out of Germany because, I dunno, German workers are too expensive? Nah.
Die deutsche Autoindustrie sieht sich in den USA als Krisengewinner.
Germany’s car industrial complex is slowly turning into more of a complex kind of a complex if you know what I’m sayin’ as demand for car sales has dropped to a twenty year low here, which isn’t all that very complex at all if you stop and think about it. Once considered to be about as invulnerable to economic fluctuations as the German car industry, the German car industry is now starting to look like the American one. Well no, it ain’t quite that ugly. But let’s just say der Lack ist ab (all the glamour, or paint, is gone, or at least going).
After several German car manufacturers decided to send thousands of their employees on a not so well-deserved five-week Kurzarbeit (reduced hours) Christmas break, which must have ruined a whole lot of otherwise quite stable marriages, the workers are now returning but a better market situation isn’t. Sales of BMW in evil US-Amerika, for instance, are over forty percent lower than they were a year ago. The Nightmare On Assembly Line Street continues, in other words. Freddy Krueger is a German name, by the way.
Why it’s getting so bad (how bad is it?), it’s getting so bad that German male men car executive types are now having to let themselves be lectured at like little school boys by a woman, of all people, about how to make cars, of all things, or at least how man (one) could make them. Angie wants them to be more “innovative” or something.
This is of course an impossible thing to ask however as Germans only know how to make race cars and this solar and battery stuff just isn’t sexy enough, at least not yet. And nuclear energy-powered cars would just be verboten out of hand so don’t even ask.
“Der Auftragsbestand liegt um elf Prozent unter dem Vorjahreswert und damit auf dem niedrigsten Niveau seit Ende der 80er Jahre.”
Observing Hermann 