The BMW Group has delivered more than 100,000 electrified vehicles to customers worldwide in 2017, as promised at the beginning of last year. This underlines the company’s leadership role when it comes to electro-mobility. An eye-catching light installation will mark this milestone on the road to the mobility of the future, with the BMW Group headquarters, the world-famous “Four-Cylinder” in the north of Munich, transformed into a battery. The BMW Group selected this glowing symbol to represent the technological change taking place in mobility. By 2025, the company will offer 25 fully electric and plug-in hybrid models worldwide.
The fifth generation of electric drive train and battery technology, available from 2021, uses scalable, modular electrification kits that will allow all model series to be fitted with every type of drive train. For its BMW i electric brand, which was founded in 2011, the company has already secured the naming rights from BMW i1 to i9, as well as from BMW iX1 to iX9. Next year will see the launch of the BMW i8 Roadster, followed in 2019 by a fully electric MINI; in 2020, by the electric version of the BMW X3 and in 2021 by the brand’s new technology flagship, the BMW iNext, which will combine electro-mobility with autonomous driving and new interior connectivity options for the first time in a series-production model. The BMW Group adopted a holistic approach to electro-mobility early, when it launched project i, the trailblazer for BMW i, back in 2007. By the following year, electric test fleets took to the roads worldwide in the largest wide-scale EV field trial the automotive industry had ever seen. Series production of the fully-electric BMW i3, one of the most-awarded vehicle concepts in the world, began in 2013. Since then, sales have increased every year, for the past four consecutive years. Electrified models are in especially high demand in Western Europe and the USA, for example, where they account for seven per cent of total BMW brand sales in both markets. In Scandinavia, where the BMW i3 is the best-selling BMW model, one in four BMWs sold is electrified. In Germany, new registrations of fully-electric and plug-in hybrid BMW Group vehicles will reach more than 10,000 units this year. Electrified drive trains also play an increasingly important role in the engine mix for individual models: In 2017, every tenth model of the highly successful BMW 3 Series Sedan delivered to customers worldwide was electrified. In the case of the BMW 2 Series Active Tourer, 13 per cent of the models sold in 2017 were plug-in hybrids. Since its launch in June 2017, the MINI Cooper S E Countryman ALL4 already accounts for one in ten of MINI Countryman sales around the world. Sales of the all-electric BMW i3 also increased by around a quarter.
