Cain's Segments: Midsize Luxury Vehicles

Mercedes-Benz E-Class sales shot up 44% in August 2013, a 2008-unit gain. This improvement followed up on July’s 10% year-over-year improvement, which put an end to four consecutive months of decline for the now-recently facelifted E-Class, Mercedes-Benz’s core midsize model.

To Mercedes’ own credit, they’ve built four cars around the E-Class nameplate: a sedan, coupe, convertible, and wagon. (Sales of the CLS-Class fell 4% to 778 units in August.) Comparing the E-Class with cars like, for instance, the Jaguar XF, isn’t necessarily an apples-to-apples contest. But showing the E’s massive 6000+ unit August in the context of cars like the XF (757 August sales) or even the Audi A6 (2110 August sales) highlights just how commonplace the E-Class has become.

The E-Class’s category, however, doesn’t have the presence this year that it did in the first two-thirds of 2012. The still-fresh Lexus GS has taken a big hit. Infiniti’s M, soon to be called the Q70, is increasingly unpopular. In 2012, annual M volume fell below 10,000 units for the second time since 2005. The Volvo S80 – overlooked, ignored, forgotten – attracted fewer buyers during the first eight months of 2013 than the E-Class did in one August week.

The Cadillac CTS, a tweener which has often been compared with cars like the BMW 3-Series based on its value proposition, will be a more direct rival for the E-Class and BMW 5-Series when the third-generation variant arrives. For now, displaying it with these cars, the CTS is relatively popular, but nowhere near as common a purchase/lease as it was a year ago. CTS sales in 2012 slid 17%.

Speaking of BMW, while sales of the 5-Series skyrocketed in August, it’s actually down 32 units this year, a year in which the new vehicle market has grown 9.5%.

Acura’s flagship sedan has reported impressive numbers in 2013, but only if you compare them with the figures posted by the Acura RL last year. Nevertheless, of the 7775 extra Acuras sold so far this year, 2344 can be attributed to the RLX/RL pairing. (The RLX went on sale in February but Acura began combining figures for the new car and old car in May.)

The RLX still plays a low-key role in Acura showrooms, accounting for just 2.4% of all Acura brand sales through eight months. Indeed, only at Jaguar, where the XF is the best-selling car in a four-car lineup, does an automaker’s midsize luxury “sports” sedan generate as large a percentage of the brand’s lineup as the E-Class does at Mercedes-Benz. 21.2% of Mercedes-Benz’s non-Sprinter volume comes from the E-Class quartet.

Setting aside the category’s poor year-to-date performance, August was a great month for midsize luxury car sales. As anticipated, CTS sales slid. As anticipated, so did sales of the S80 and Infiniti M. With huge improvements elsewhere, the segment rose by 4877 units, a 30% improvement.

Expanding the scope to include the Acura TL, Audi A7, Cadillac XTS (and its predecessors), Hyundai Equus, Lexus ES, Lincoln MKS and MKZ, Mercedes-Benz CLS-Class, and Volvo’s XC70 wagon produces a very different picture. In that case, August sales shot up 17.9% while the year-to-date total is up 5.4% to 254,856 units, buoyed in large part by the front-wheel-drive Lexus. The $36,370 ES sells more often than anything else in the group. ES volume is up 60% this year.

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