IMO waiting for a full quarter may be more reasonable, but waiting for a full year and it’s old news.
> they are using registrations
> which means actual sales
Some purchased cars are never registered (track use, private export etc.), or defer the registration (no reason to pay road tax if you're not driving it yet).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.