#PremiumSales

Discouraging results at BMW USA persisted in May 2016 as the brand continues to suffer from the successful, and somewhat artificially successful, end to 2015. May sales at the BMW Group tumbled nine percent, with blame largely falling on the shoulders of BMW’s most popular cars and the Mini brand.

BMW’s urge to generate record U.S. sales in 2015 ended with a 2,935-unit margin of victory over Mercedes-Benz, BMW’s chief global rival, and a 1,422-unit margin over Toyota’s Lexus brand.

News of the alleged victory, however, was followed by controversy, as it became increasingly clear that a chunk of BMW’s sales at the end of the year were spurious. “BMW paid its dealers as much as $1,750 a vehicle in December to put new models in their service fleets,” Automotive News reported in February. And without those sales, BMW was not likely the top-selling premium brand in America in 2015 – Lexus was.

BMW went on a mad rager last year as it did everything it possibly could to claim the U.S. luxury sales crown from Mercedes and Lexus — and now katzenjammer is in full effect.

The premium German brand is looking at piled-up stocks of cars sitting on dealer lots. Predictably, those dealers aren’t happy, and BMW is trying to inject some saline to recover.