Wow.

That being said:

My local Infinti dealer has a small mountain’s worth of granite flooring, luxury furniture, a kitchen/bar with a chef that can prepare fresh omelletes or crepes for breakfast, an espresso bar with plenty of gourmet coffees, a couple fancy of Infiniti Lifestyle display cases with attache cases and apparel, and a sound-proofed home theater with seating for 20 in the service department waiting area.

All these amenities still weren’t bringing customers into the showrooms. But a $19.99 oil service promotion sure did.

Leasing was a huge risk that luxury manufacturers took to increase production, spread development production costs among that greater production volume. While the manufacturers get the cars back, the lessees have much a lot of the depreciation on that good. And the manufacturer gets to sell a “lightly used” “pre-owned” – read USED – car.

That it took BMW from a niche 60,000 per year US sales player to a major 200,000 per year US sales player and over 1 million globally means the gamble paid off.

The risk was that consumers might run out of sufficient personal credit to pay for that type of indulgence.

What is so ironic is that BMW’s (and MB’s) reputation was predicated on the design and construction of purposeful cars that were aesthetically appealing and yet hardy enough to stay on the roads in one owner’s hands for decades and several hundred thousand miles. This reputation combined with low production volumes meant that the cars retained real value for their owners. The new BMW/ Mercedes leasing era ushered in a “lifestyle”. The new hype from Sindelfingen and Munich was that that the real value in possessing a luxury automobile was showing the world you could keep changing them like changing expensive shoes.

Except that consumers who buy expensive shoes such as Allen Edmunds tend to keep them for more than three years. They merely get them re-soled.

I’m like you, if I walk into a dealership and my first thought is to start looking for an orchestra I know I’m in the wrong place.

Heck, the dealer I bought my VW was under construction and I bought my car in a trailer and couldn’t give a crap I wasn’t getting a swedish massage when signing the contract.

As for residual values, I am looking into a 530i 2007 and dealers are fighting and keeping prices too high. Specially in SoCal where there are so many Bimmers, you would think they would try to move inventory faster. I went to AutoTrader and there are more than 400 Bimmers advertise just for that specific model.

Lower the prices at least 10% and you might get more sales.

It seems like the E90 depreciated much more quickly than the E46 did, or maybe it’s just me.