Lexus Tops BMW, Mercedes To Retain No. 1 U.S. Spot For Luxury Cars
Toyota Motor Corporations Lexus has done it again for the 11th straight years. The premium luxury brand from Japanese auto maker has outsold its German competitor, BMW and Mercedes, to be No. one in the luxury car segment of U.S. auto industry.
The Toyota Motor Corporation. luxury brand sold 229,329 units in the U.S. in 2010. BMW came in 2nd with 220,113 unit sales for the year. Mercedes-Benz was the 3rd place premium brand with 216,448 vehicles sold previous year. Lexus has been the leader in premium sales in the United States for over a decade. But it is grip on the title is slipping. The Lexus annual lead over BMW shrank to 9,216, less than half the 19,473 gap in 2009. Mercedes’s U.S. sales increased 14% last year, leaving the Stuttgart, Germany-based automaker’s brand in third. “It was a bit of a roller coaster” for Lexus previous year, said Jesse Toprak, an analyst at TrueCar.com, a website that tracks auto sales. “They certainly got impacted negatively by the lingering recall news for Toyota, and we’ve also seen BMW and Benz being more aggressive when it came to incentive spending and marketing.”