Switzerland is a country that has it pretty bad on the way cars are sold, to be owned, taxed and so on. Despite this, the Swiss do like their cars.

I suppose you have to in a country where car passion is borderline on illegal, willingness to change cars is something worth fighting for.

This is where the problems came up. Recently, due to to conversion rates, the Swiss began shopping cars in neighboring countries such as Germany and France.

Since the Euro was much cheaper than usual and due to adjusted pricing policies, the new shoppers could save thousands on the purchase of a new car.

At this point, BMW intervened to cut some of their losses and to keep Swiss customers from buying their cars outside their country of residence.

Swiss regulators on competition quickly caught on to this situation and eventually ended up fining the Bavarian car maker for the unpleasant situation.

We’re not very sure of the sort of fines imposed in such situations but we do know how much BMW was charged for this problem.

It was a 156 million Swiss francs fine, that translates into roughly 163 million USD that the Swiss Competition Commission imposed.

The charge laid out is impeding direct and parallel imports. BMW have responded by saying that they’ll be fighting the decision in a Swiss court.

According to BMW their dealer agreements work under the European Economic Area’s legislation and do not have an impact on actual competition in Switzerland.

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Marcus M.

http://www.bmwcoop.com

The post BMW fined in Switzerland over competition concerns appeared first on BMWCoop | BMW Blog, BMW News, BMW Reviews.

Not all the news we’ve seen come in recently are that brilliant as the launching of the F12/F13 BMW M6 if we’re honest. There’s one that crept over the weekend and is rather nasty.

In the USA, Land of the Free and plenty such things, people take recalls and such very seriously. Problem is, they’ve decided the Bavarians don’t feel the same way.

That’s why the NHTSA slapped a massive 3 million dollar fine on BMW’s plate. Like I said, not great news, but there is some decent reasoning behind the decision.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration started an investigation into BMW’s handling of recalls back in 2010. The investigation span an impressive amount of work.

Looking into 16 recalls that reached as far back as 2002 and covered over 300.000 BMW cars (and bikes) the authority took its time before coming up with a final decision.

The evidence was overwhelming and it seems that in all the cases the NHTSA looked into, BMW behaved in pretty much the same way.

Once they discovered a problem, the Bavarians would file with the NHTSA but they would provide very little information in it.

That essential information came later, in some cases considerably and the authority considered this practice unacceptable.

Since BMW North America accepted to pay the fine as a form of settlement and promised to make some changes in the way they handle recalls, it probably is.

BMW customer care has always felt like something special but this situation shows us that there is still considerable room for improvement.

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Marcus M.

http://www.bmwcoop.com

The post BMW gets a 3 million dollar fine appeared first on BMWCoop | BMW Blog, BMW News, BMW Reviews.