Right, the useful number instead of a comparison between cars sold to the European public and cars sold at the location as a matter of the logistical accident that it is the head quarters of the manufacturer.

Registration is useful because it cuts out cars manufactured in Germany but shipped to South Africa. We don’t want to bias these numbers based on each company’s internal logistics. That stuff is more relevant from a jobs perspective than a market perspective.

I didn’t say they were guaranteed to be 1:1, but every registration is an actual sale. The point is the number of sales is going to be grater than or equal to the number of registrations. So this isn’t some gameable metric like number of cars manufactured.

It’s possible there is some underlying bias here, but there’s no reason to assume it favors one company over the other enough to offset a 300 car difference in a single month especially as the total numbers just aren’t that high.

I'm not arguing the thrust of your point here, just noting that there isn't a 1:1 correspondence in case anyone's under that particular misconception.

I agree that registrations is probably the least bad metric, and I doubt BMW is gaming it in this case.

But saying it isn't gameable is a bridge too far. Manufacturers can trivially game it, it's just marginally more expensive to do so than to shift manufacturing numbers between quarters

E.g. BMW used to operate its own car rental, they could manufacture 1k vehicles each month in Q3, then sell them all to themselves in the last month of Q3, and register them at the same time.

They can also do this with any "self dealing" or corporate registrations by simply sitting on inventory and then lowering their prices, consumers would take care of the rest.

The problem with self dealing is they need to pay taxes at registration. So while sure you can inflate the numbers it isn’t just an on paper thing this is treated as a sale and there’s real consequences of that.

As to shifting the quarter something is sold, people aren’t getting a car before registration here. Selling of excess inventory at a discount is still actual sales.

Sure, but now we've shifted from "isn’t gameable" to "gameable for a price", perhaps to inflate the stock price as you make the news for outselling Tesla or something.

And yes, you'd need to deliver the car to consumers. I'm just saying that you can time shift when that happens, if you wanted to inflate the numbers in the short term for whatever reason.

By your metric sales are also “gameable for a price” as long as you are willing to take a big enough loss essentially an unlimited number of people will buy new cars at 1,000$ a pop.

What makes metrics like manufacturing actually “gameable” is you can still sell the cars manufactured with the buzz from manufacturing more X than anyone else. Pump the numbers for 6 months and then cut production and coast until product is sold off. Your out a little time value of money but it doesn’t take much free play to cover that.