More than £11MILLION worth of luxury BMWs destroyed after being filled with sand on their way to the UK

MORE than £11million worth of luxury BMWs have been scrapped after accidentally being filled with sand while being transported to the UK.

The cars were parked next to a construction site in Cuxhaven, a port town in northern Germany, which housed a huge pile of sand.

The giant mound blew all over the vehicles, leaving 450 damaged beyond repair.

A further 3,500 luxury motors were in need of servicing and checks before they could be distributed to retailers in Britain.

With a typical BMW 3 series - the firm's most popular vehicle - costing £25,000, the 450 wrecked models are believed to have cost over £11million.

And according to workers, several of the company's £120,000 i8 hybrid sports cars were also caught in the sandstorm.

Southampton Cargo Handling was tasked with cleaning as many as 30 cars a day between April and June.

Workers had to remove sand from air filters and alternators, an employee claimed.

Images from the operation show sand coming out of a car's bumper, and pooling underneath the motors.

A company insider said: "A flat matte paint job for these cars costs around £20,000 - they are that expensive.

"Around 4,000 cars were covered by big mountains of sand - many were scrapped costing BMW a small fortune.

"The vehicles they didn't scrap were distributed around the UK. We service BMWs to make them squeaky clean for dealerships and rental companies in the south of England.

"It was quite shocking when we heard what happened in a brief by management. A lot of cars which came through to us had sand falling out including one car which had sand falling from the bumper."

The employee claimed vehicles worth around £50,000 were among those serviced after BMW had carried out their own checks.

Damaged models allegedly included the M140i, M2, M3, 218, 220, 230, 320,330, M4, M5 - and a handful of new i8s were also thought to have been destroyed, according to the insider.

A BMW spokesman said: "A number of BMW vehicle orders were affected due to a major storm in Cuxhaven, one of the key ports through which many UK-bound vehicles travel.

"The severe weather resulted in construction materials located at the Port contaminating a number of vehicles while in transit.

"Roughly 4,000 cars were at the Port so needed to be checked. Of those, there are about 450 where we deemed it necessary to either build a new car for the customer or offer them an alternative vehicle that we already had in stock.

"As a precaution we thoroughly checked and cleaned every vehicle, many of which were completely unaffected.

"In the case of these more severely affected cases, these customer orders were replaced with entirely new cars.

"This has meant a delay for a number of customers in receiving their vehicles but ensured they are receiving a vehicle in perfect condition.

"Generally speaking, as with all BMW vehicles, customers can have confidence in a full 3-year factory warranty.

"This work was carried out and overseen by technical experts from BMW AG in Germany and meets all our exacting internal quality audit standards."