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Did BMW really win the luxury car sales race?

As anyone who follows our monthly By The Numbers series already knows, the luxury car sales race in the United States was close all of last year as BMW, Lexus and Mercedes-Benz seesawed up and down for sales supremacy. At the end of the year, it was BMW on top of the standings with 346,023 total sales. Or was it? According to data released by Polk, comparing the actual number of vehicles registered between the three top luxury players in the US paints a slightly different picture. Polk's data suggests that only 335,259 BMWs were registered in 2015, compared to 340,392 Lexus models. Why the disparity? It's all a matter of timing. Actual end consumers buy new cars, in almost all cases, from a franchised dealer. BMW delivered 346,023 vehicles in 2015, but only 335,259 of them were registered by their new owners. Presumably, those 11,000 BMWs did (or will) end up registered in the driveways of consumers, but they hadn't before January 1, 2016. Lexus General Manager Jeff Bracken wrote in an email to Automotive News, "Luxury sales leadership as measured by vehicle registrations is important to Lexus as it represents actual consumers engaging directly with our dealers." Of course, it goes without saying that we'll be paying keen attention to the 2016 luxury car sales race as it unfolds. If it's anything like it was in 2015, it'll come down to the wire, and even then may not be entirely clear. Related Video: News Source: Automotive News - sub. req.Image Credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty BMW Lexus Mercedes-Benz Car Buying Car Dealers Luxury luxury cars

Xcar gets Lexus LFA serviced at TMG

Toyota has made all manner of vehicles, from sedans and hatchbacks to crossovers and pickup trucks. It's even done a handful of sports cars over the years. But it's only ever done one real supercar, and that was the Lexus LFA. The ten-cylinder supercar was built at the dedicated, purpose-built LFA Works, a facility within Toyota City in Japan that's since moved on to making everything from bicycles to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. But if you were lucky enough to be among the 500 customers to get your hands on an LFA, you may not be inclined to send it back to the factory every time it needs servicing. Especially not if you live in, say, Europe. That's why Toyota Motorsport GmbH was tasked with handling service for the LFA for Europe. The facility in Cologne, Germany, was once home to the automaker's F1 team, now runs its championship-winning endurance racing team and will soon again serve as the home base for its renewed assault on the World Rally Championship. So it's just the type of facility that could handle whatever comes up with Lexus' high-strung exotic, from servicing the V10 engine to repairing the carbon-fiber chassis if need be. After checking out the underground collection in its last episode, the guys at Xcar popped their heads in at the LFA service center. There they spoke with TMG VP Rob Leupen, who seems convinced that Toyota should make a new hybrid supercar. We hope he turns out to be right.

Toyota GR GT3 Concept: a long, lean racer with road aspirations

Toyota and Lexus trundled into the 2022 Tokyo Auto Salon with a bundle of modded gear. There are two especially racy bits — one, the GRMN Yaris we've already covered, and this, the Gazoo Racing GT3 Concept that is philosophically, if not aesthetically, related to the Yaris. Toyota believes it can provide more enjoyment for customers by commercializing race cars than by making customer cars racy. So instead of turning one of its road cars into a GT3-class competitor (Toyota does sell a Supra GT4), the GT3 Concept could be a customer potential race car that, as required by GT3 homologation rules, would become a road car.   Toyota Gazoo Racing President Koji Sato said the competition division will make a prototype GR GT3 at some point this year. That doesn't mean the exercise will go beyond this one-off, but Gazoo did also say, "TGR intends to use feedback and technologies refined through participation in various motorsports activities to develop both GT3 and mass-production cars and further promote making ever-better motorsports-bred cars," so its seems we will feel the effects of this somewhere. Based on the form factor of long, low hood and truncated, sloping rear, we could draw a line from the GR GT3 Concept to the Lexus Electrified Sport concept the luxury arm showed in December. Inspired by the LFA, that road car concept was claimed to hit 60 mph in the low 2-second range and be able to run about 435 miles on a charge. But we think it makes a lot more sense to draw a line from the GR GT3 Concept to Mazda's RX Vision GT3 concept from March 2020. We're not accusing GR of copying, but Toyota and Mazda are tight, and these two concepts could be confused for different skins on the same chassis in a video game. We'd be happy to see both make it to GT3 competition as it means there'd be street-legal versions, and frankly, this is probably a better path from circuit to street than the LMDh endurance racing hypercar that Gazoo Racing has toyed with turning into a street-going customer option. Elsewhere on the carmaker's Tokyo Auto Show stand, there was a racy on-road concept from Toyota and two off-road focused concepts from Lexus. The Toyota bZ4X GR Sport Concept turns the battery-electric crossover into a Friday L.A. nightclub hopper with a matte black exterior on big wheels in low-profile tires, and sport seats inside.