450 BMW cars bound to the UK are scrapped due to sandstorm

[markjay]

More than £11MILLION worth of luxury BMWs destroyed after being filled with sand on their way to the UK

Bad news? Or good news? Discuss....

 

[kianok]

Shocking.....scrap it immediately.

 

[WDB124066]

A few questions spring to mind;

From a Construction site?
They knew the bad weather was coming?
They didn't secure their materials or semi finished building?
Who on the Constructors side is responsible for that?
Have they not had near misses before to learn from?
Where was that responsible person from?
Do that in Australia during cyclone season and you will be severely punished.
Leave loose material lying around on a Platform and you will also be severely punished, everybody is trained not to do it, the construction industry knows these risks, why did this happen in Germany of all places?
Who gets the contact to clean the cars?

 

[grober]

"With a typical BMW 3 series - the firm's most popular vehicle - costing £25,000, the 450 wrecked models are believed to have cost over £11million."
That's represents their retail value not what they cost BMW to make. You would have to deduct further shipping/delivery/storage costs, dealer profit margin, vat, car tax etc from that retail figure to get an accurate loss figure to BMW. For the vehicles written off there's going to to be no ongoing risk factor for warranty claims either something that's presumably also factored into the retail price- where they and the customer might lose out is with increased warranty claims for the cars they do clean up and retail. With current BMW factory production-from- order running at 6 months for some models and deliveries often put back due to component supply difficulty its entirely possible this is merely the equivalent of slight production line glitch. There's a story about a certain make of car that had a well characterised production line fault which could be detected fairly early on the production line but the manufacturer chose only to reject it once it was built. The reason given was that it cost more to interrupt the production line process than to scrap an entire car at the end. I would offer that the raw economics/costs of car production may be far from obvious for anyone not working in the field and it would be dangerous to infer any losses from a final retail price.

 

[219]

Just as well Rommel’s Afrika Corps weren’t relying on BMW of today .

At least most of their vehicles were made by Mercedes-Benz or VW .

 

[markjay]

Or Adam Opel AG...

 

[Petrol Pete]

Further to what Grober said ^^^^ I am aware of a production fault on brand new cars that were being built here in the UK a few years ago, a fault in the paint process was spotted (a bit late) as finished vehicles were stored before transport.

The decision was made to scrap them as the long term paint warranty on the vehicles would prove massively expensive in the long run.

Here's the rub. In order to claim on insurance the vehicles had to be 'whole' so as to be given a cost £ , no chance to strip them down , remember they are brand new still on factory premises, never driven.

They were all crushed.

Nearly 400 of them.

 

[Dippo]

It's a "Sun" headline. The BMW spokesman didn't say the cars would be scrapped - he said the cars would have to be re-ordered for the retail customers. There will probably be an increase in the number of ex-management cars available from BMW as these are rotated through their fleet and sold as used cars.

 

[markjay]

It's a "Sun" headline. The BMW spokesman didn't say the cars would be scrapped - he said the cars would have to be re-ordered for the retail customers. There will probably be an increase in the number of ex-management cars available from BMW as these are rotated through their fleet and sold as used cars.

OK, so 'it's the Sun'.

But surely not the Daily Mail as well....? [emoji46]

BMWs worth £11million are scrapped after 'sandstorm' in port

 

[Dippo]

Read the Mail report again:

"BMW denied i8s were among those scrapped - but said 450 cars were destroyed and had to be replaced.

A BMW spokesman said: 'A number of BMW vehicle orders were affected due to a major storm in Cuxhaven, one of the key ports through which many UK-bound vehicles travel.

'The severe weather resulted in construction materials located at the Port contaminating a number of vehicles while in transit.

'Roughly 4,000 cars were at the port so needed to be checked.

'Of those, there are about 450 where we deemed it necessary to either build a new car for the customer or offer them an alternative vehicle that we already had in stock.'"


The BMW spokesman said effectively that there were 450 cars which did not meet customer standards; he did not say they were destroyed or would be scrapped - those appear to be the Mail's words. What do you do with a car that can't be sold as a new car? Put it on your company fleet, then sell it as used.

 

[PenelopePitstop]

I'm glad I didn't decide to get stock BMW recently ;-) Was testing M240 Coupe but wasn't impressed.

 

[Mactech]

Yes, motor manufactures are very cagey about what gets in to the retail chain. The development and engineering dept cars at Bentley all have a date with the crusher. As the Motorsport Dept, we had lots of travelling to do, so had an arrangement to use a constantly changing fleet of cars for legitimate company business and postpone their inevitable demise.
One of my favourites was this V8S which I travelled many miles in, up and down to Lake District (where the racecars were built) and to lots of airports.....
It was an ex 'Quality' car and faultless.....just a big shame where it ended up