BMW retains the crown as a best-selling premium brand in 2024

Due to a complicated economic and political climate and falling demand for luxury products, sales of the three German premium manufacturers – Audi, BMW, and Mercedes – have fallen. However, BMW retained its crown as the best-selling premium brand globally.

All three German premium manufacturers saw declining sales in 2024 due to the complicated economic and political climate and falling demand for luxury products. However, the most affected by the political and economic climate is the Audi brand, whose sales fell 11.8% to 1,671,218 units.

The drop in Audi sales is due to the fact that the Ingolstadt-based brand had many models at the end of their lifecycle in 2024 and all newly launched models – Audi A5, Q5, A6 e-tron – were only available towards the end of the year or are due to reach dealers in January 2025.
Also expected in 2025 is a new-generation Audi Q3, which is a bestseller for Audi.

Audi sales fell across the world: -5.9% in Europe (excluding Germany) -21.3% in Germany, -13.0% in North America, and -10.9% in China.

Mercedes passenger car division sales fell 3% to 1,983,400 units. Mercedes’ smaller decline was due to the good result in Q4 2024, when global sales rose 1%, and good sales in the North American market, rose 8% in 2024 to 365,400 units.

In contrast, Mercedes sales fell 3% in Europe mainly due to a 9% decline in the German market and 7% in Asia due to a 7% decline in the Chinese market.

BMW was least affected by the political-economic climate and its sales fell by only 2.3% to 2,200,177 units. BMW doesn’t separately report BMW and Mini sales by region, but combined BMW and Mini sales were up to 0.6% in Europe and 0.2% in North America, with the only decline in the Asian market of 10.2%. Thus, BMW ended 2024 more than 215,000 units ahead of Mercedes and more than 520,000 units ahead of Audi.

Also, in the field of sports models, the BMW M GmbH division is the absolute leader with 206,582 units sold which represents an increase of 2.1%. Audi Sport only sold just over 41,000 units.

Mercedes does not report AMG sales separately but only the sales of the Top End division which includes in addition to AMG sales the S-Class, GLS, G-Class, EQS, EQS SUV, and Maybach. Mercedes sold 281,500 Top-End models, but taking all these models into account, AMG division sales alone cannot exceed 200,000 units.

BMW also leads in sales of electric models. BMW sold 593,215 fully electric and PHEV models in 2024 of which 426,594 full-electric models, which represents an increase of 13.5% compared to 2023. In addition, sales of electric models account for almost 20% of total sales, or 19.4%.

By comparison, Mercedes managed to sell only 367,600 electrified models (fully electric and PHEV), and only 185,100 are full electric models, which represents a dramatic decrease of 23% globally and less than 10% of total sales, namely 9.3%. This more than doubles BMW’s fully electric model sales compared to Mercedes. Audi sold more than 164,000 electric models, which represents a drop of 8% globally.
Instead, Mercedes sold the highest number of PHEV models in 2024, with 182,500 units compared with 166,621 for the BMW brand.