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Originally Posted by snareman
Yea, the increased luxury makes sense to me. Like I said though it seemed like it used to be that the higher models like the 7 has fancy new tech that would take several years to trickle down, but now seems that the tech is pretty close to the same across the line up.
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This is absolutely the case across the luxury space and it is reflective of the stiffer competition posed by non-luxury manufacturers and shifting buyer demographics. In the past Luxury cars sold themselves as sort of must have for various segments of the population. So the car makers could very easily slice those luxury buyers up into neat little squares where the smaller, cheaper, car was aimed at introducing the buyers to the lineup at a younger stage in life and as they moved up career and family size they moved up in the lineup. Since they’d also be older they had more money to spend as well. Of course, you needed to offer them things that pulled them up tier and kept them there.
You fast forward to today where the younger generation is increasingly buying used cars and are uninterested in “luxury” features, but are heavily focused on technology and you combine that with lots of tech being available on cars that are a fraction of the price of luxury cars and you see why automakers are going down this road. Don’t forget that the new car buyers in the US are older as well and aren’t as interested in the tech so you have two converging realities at play. If the automaker fails to find younger buyers they’ll fade as older buyers die off.
A prime example of this was when Mercedes-Benz revamped their in car infotainment system the last time with MBUX and it was introduced to the market on the A class instead of the S class. The old playbook would have never seen this occur! But Mercedes was pitching it as a car that could hopefully keep a younger buyer out of a Tesla Model 3. If the buyer wanted electric obviously the A class was a non-starter, but if they wanted “luxury” and “tech” they might look at Mercedes — or so they hoped.
You’re going to see more of this and not less. If anything the current market shortages have forced luxury brands to try and return a bit to the older model, but it won’t last long. IMHO the luxury brands are struggling REALLY HARD to adapt to the new world.