Germany / UK Premium Marque Comparison 2014

It will always remain a rare sight in Germany

Both nations are big buyers of more expensive vehicles so this head to head has some interesting potential. Germany has BMW, Audi and Mercedes, while the UK offers Land Rovers and Jaguars while further down in the luxury area the UK is well represented. Loyalty will play a part on what sells where. The statistics come for the VDA and SMMT. Pale blue shows where the marque is more successful in the UK, and yellow Germany. With more cars sold in Germany to a ratio of 1: 1.23, that establishes which colour a marque is shaded.

Premium: The obvious conclusion is how buying follows where the brand is from. Jaguar and Land Rover sales are 4 times higher in the UK, so don't get too much German patronage. BMW and Audi are only 1.6 times stronger in Germany. Take away the 1.23 sales weighting and the gap isn't huge. German makes are more accepted in Britain. Of course, German brands have many more models so that would account for most of the variance.

For Japanese marques, Infiniti is slightly favoured one way and Lexus massively the other. It is hard to understand how a respected brand as Lexus sells so few cars in Germany. Is it poor marketing?

Brand	Ger	UK	Diff
Lexus	1,328	11,572	0.11
Jaguar	4,229	18,401	0.23
Land Rover	14,679	56,200	0.26
Lotus	115	235	0.49
Alfa Romeo	3,391	5,523	0.61
MINI	33,183	53,661	0.62
Volvo	31,919	41,066	0.78
Maserati	1,103	1,194	0.92
Infiniti	1,015	746	1.36
BMW	238,253	148,878	1.60
Audi	259,459	158,987	1.63
Mercedes	272,566	124,419	2.19
Porsche	24,365	9,160	2.66

Luxury: Getting sales data for this sector is a challenge but a few can be compared. The UK is especially hard to find anything for, even the RR figure is an estimate for its home country. As it turns out, they all favour the UK but the sampling is too small to draw conclusions.

Brand	Ger	UK	Diff
Rolls Royce	91	350	0.26
Bentley	413	1472	0.28
Aston Martin	279	864	0.32
Ferrari	652	675	0.97

These are a very common sight at home and even the UK too