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A look back on BMW, South Carolina and Southern manufacturing

It has been 20 years since BMW broke ground on its Spartanburg, SC manufacturing facility, and while the automaker doesn't have any plans to mark the moment, economists and industry analysts have taken a closer look at the facility's impact on South Carolina, the South and global manufacturing. As of November, the Spartanburg plant's 7,000 employees cranked out 25,000 vehicles per month, and BMW has poured some $6 billion into the state since the plant opened in 1993. While that figure nearly matches the state's proposed budget for next year, some say there have been drawbacks.
To begin with, South Carolina provided BMW with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of public money and tax breaks with little public oversight, setting a precedent that would repeat itself with other corporations. The Detroit News reports that a Pew Center evaluation found 26 states didn't have a sufficient system for evaluating tax incentive performance. But BMW opened the door for a Southern manufacturing renaissance, with automakers from Mercedes-Benz to Hyundai and Volkswagen opening plants in the Deep South.
While states have raced to offer ever sweeter tax and cash incentives for big manufacturers, officials say BMW is proof the system can pay dividends. You can read the full piece here.

Gus Van Sant casts the BMW i8 in soft light

BMW has spent the better part of a century building its reputation with fossil-burning transportation, but now it's banking heavily on the success of its new i family of electric vehicles. In order to succeed, it will need to sell examples of the i3, but sell the idea with the i8. And in order to do so, it is going to need some out-of-the-box promotional thinking. And that's just what it seems to have done with this latest campaign of television commercials.
The series of three (or at least that's how many have been released thus far) ads wax more poetic than most of the car ads we've seen. But while they might skimp on the technical details, they don't skip over the talent. The videos are the work of Oscar-nominated director Gus Van Sant, the cinematic artist best known for films like Good Will Hunting, Milk and Finding Forrester.
Van Sant has also solicited the voices of Sam Hazeldine (Caleb from Resurrection), Sting's daughter Mickey Sumner (Sophie from Frances Ha) and Michael Pitt (Jimmy from Boardwalk Empire), but doesn't hide them behind the microphone in the recording studio. Instead they serve as the face of Bavaria's new hybrid sports car, and the results are rather stunning. See for yourself in the trio of videos below.

X1, 3 Series power BMW back into global luxury autos sales lead

BMW managed to eke ahead of Audi for the global luxury sales crown in February. According to Bloomberg, BMW saw deliveries swell by 7 percent in February, besting the 3.2 percent jump enjoyed by Audi and giving BMW a 407-unit delivery lead over its rival last month. Mercedes-Benz, meanwhile, continued to falter, with the brand selling some 37,229 fewer machines than BMW, whose factories are running at full capacity to keep up with demand. Models like the X1 (shown above) enjoyed a sales increase of 40 percent in February while the company's bread-and-butter 3 Series jumped by 26 percent.
Mercedes-Benz hopes to stem its continued market share loss with the addition of the entry-level CLA sedan to its portfolio in April. The company is set to roll out an updated version of its cash-cow E-Class at the same time, and a new-generation S-Class will follow along shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, the company is increasing production to meet demand for its A and B-Class models.