BMW will not boost Mini production

Retailers on both sides of the Atlantic are selling all of the Mini Coopers they can -- but don’t look for any big jumps in availability.

The car’s producer, BMW AG, is not interested in expanding the small British factory now supplying the world, nor opening a second assembly location, says BMW Chairman Helmut Panke.

“We won’t be doing anything like that,” Panke said, just minutes after the Mini was named the 2003 North American Car of the Year on Sunday at the show. “Let’s just take it one step at a time. Twenty-four thousand is not bad. Let’s leave it like that for a while.”

The two Mini Cooper models sold 24,590 units combined last year in the United States.

The acclaimed small car is a remnant of BMW’s ill-fated merger with the Rover Group in the 1990s. The car was designed and engineered by Rover, and then re-engineered by BMW. BMW retained the project after selling its Rover holdings.

Last month, U.S. retailers sold 3,278 Minis — suggesting an annualized selling rate of 36,000. BMW originally forecast U.S. sales of 20,000 a year. The U.S. sales company had a bare-bones 15-day selling supply on Dec. 1, and only a 10-day supply on Nov. 1.

Panke said production at the Cowley plant in Oxford, U.K., can be tweaked in different ways to make more cars, but he said BMW does not want to permanently increase output.

“We have learned new ways of producing more cars when we need to without resorting to additional factories,” he said. “We can add a workshift. We are working weekends. We’re even working on Friday afternoons.”

Panke said that U.S. demand for the Mini proves there is a viable market here for small cars “in the premium segment.”