M3 and M4 demand outstrips supply

The queue starts forming now! BMW Australia is expecting demand to outstrip supply for the new M3 sedan and M4 coupe, which are now officially available in Australia.

With BMW's factory running at full capacity and interest in the twin-turbo six-cylinder stormers high globally, BMW Australia finance director Peter Buchauer has admitted supply will be a constant challenge.

"That's a daily discussion we have over production," he told motoring.com.au as the Australian-New Zealand launch kicked off in Auckland last night. "We are going to be able to sell every one we can get our hands on.

"From a numbers perspective we will see how it goes, but in terms of production capacity we will take every one of these cars we can get."

The F80 M3 is the fourth generation sedan, while the F82 coupe is the fifth generation two-door, but the first to be dubbed M4 rather than M3, reflecting the new naming convention for BMW's compact prestige coupes and convertibles.

Buchauer played down the chances of the waiting list for the M3/M4 extending too long and described it as the inevitable outcome of serving pent up global demand for the new cars.

"Certainly at the beginning sports cars have a very steep start-up when they are quite new," he said. "We expect 2014 and product and 2015 production to be taken up quite quickly.

"Then let's see how the life cycle will turn out over the years."

"I am sure where that car is and being priced where it is, we can get quite good volumes out of it... I think we will be very happy with the sales volume we achieve.

BMW announced pricing for the new M3 and M4 in May with both sedan and coupe climbing in price over their V8 predecessors. However, BMW was claiming new equipment valued at $8500 more than covered the increase.

There are still plenty of expensive options though, including $900 for the driving assistant that included lane departure warning and city braking assistant, $2360 LED headlights and $15,000 carbon ceramic brakes.

Last year, in their final year on-sale, the E90/92/93 M3 family, which also included a convertible, accounted for around 330 sales. The F83 M4 convertible, does not go on-sale in Australia until 2015.

Buchauer said the issue with M3/M4 availability reflected the brand's entire range, with most models proving difficult to access in the numbers BMW Australia want, because of the imbalance between manufacturing and demand.

"A lot of what is limiting is production capacity," he said. "We've got Europe coming back online and starting to recover, the USA is doing quite well, Asia is growing and China is still there."

Despite the production challenges BMW sales are up more than 10 per cent year-on-year in Australia and seven per cent globally. The company is on-track to hit its global two million annual sales target (including Mini and Rolls-Royce) in 2014 – two years ahead of schedule.

Watch out for our first local-ish (well southern hemisphere) drive review of the new M3 and M4 right here from Wednesday evening.