[mose121]

Originally Posted by detroitm2

I'm talking about vehicle types, not individual models. There will always be a handful of specific models that do not sell well, but they keep producing for various reasons. The same goes for pretty much any manufacture of cars. A lot of which is just due to the fact they're extremely similar to another model (all the GT's for example), and are relatively cheap to produce in a plant that already has the tooling for their counterparts.

The X series, for example, is largely manufactured inside the US, so even if the X4, and X6 are not selling, they can continue to make them as there are no import concerns.

You are actually making my point. The wagon is built on the exact same platform as the standard 3 series, and is therefore very easy and cheaper to produce alongside the standard 3 series. Plus, they're still going to be producing wagons for many other markets and there is very little that would have to be done to keep selling sell them in the U.S. The 3GT is built on a modified Chinese market only long wheel base 3 series platform, as such it costs more to produce, requires more extensive crash testing than the wagon would, it sold terribly, and is being killed off completely for good reason. The viability of 3 series wagon sales vs models like the X4 would be easier to determine if BMW actually told us how many wagons they sold, but they just lump them in with all 3 series models so we don't know how many were actually sold here. Regardless, if they just put in a small effort it would be easy to keep bringing the wagons over. The mid 2000's shift to a volume sales business model was supposed to support lower volume models that true BMW enthusiasts want them to build. And those models are not ones like the 3GT/5GT/X2/X4. I don't know a single BMW enthusiast that would buy any of those models for themselves.