It’s official: 2018 wasn’t great but December was downright terrible for MINI USA sales. For the month MINI USA sales totaled 2,797 vehicles, a decrease of 39.3 percent from the 4,611 sold in the same month a year ago. That’s worth pausing in for a moment. Almost 40% down is a huge decrease that was mostly due to smaller MINIs poor showing which were all down over 45%.

Mini USA salesMini USA sales

Total year sales for the MINI Countryman sport-activity vehicle increased 18.2 percent in 2018 compared with 14,864 sales in 2017. In 2018, MINI USA reported a total of 43,684 vehicles sold, a decrease of 7.3 percent from the 47,105 vehicles sold in 2017.

There was one positive trend – MINI Pre-Owned Vehicles. MINI Certified Pre-Owned sold 988 vehicles in December, an increase of 16.8 percent from December 2017. Total MINI Pre-Owned sold 2,461 vehicles in December, derease of 6.5 percent from December 2017. For the whole of 2018, total MINI Pre-Owned sales increased 4.9 percent compared with 2017.

The current generation of MINIs are the best engineered and most trouble free ever offered and yet they’re simply not finding buyers as they have in the past. We went in depth on this issue and others in our recent conversation with MINI USA head of marketing Pat McKenna. While it’s easy to arm-chair a few hypothesis around why, our interview with Pat actually spells out the issues fairly clearly. You can check out the full interview here.