BMW has ambitious plans for electric vehicles, projecting that at least one of every two sales by 2030 will be fully electric.
As its sales grow, the German automaker intends to challenge Tesla’s dominance of the US electric vehicle market. As a reminder, Tesla ended the Bavarian company’s reign over the US luxury car market last year.
This year, BMW aims to sell 200,000 EVs globally, doubling last year’s deliveries. While that’s still far from Tesla’s more than 930,000 sales in 2021 and likely 1 million+ sales in 2022, BMW executives appear confident that Tesla will lose its competitive advantage.
Speaking to US journalists at a press event, BMW Group sales chief Pieter Nota said the company will focus “on a very strong and fast ramp-up of electric vehicles,” according to Automotive News.
“Tesla had a unique selling point for quite some time. That’s over.”
He added that EV customers in the past couple of years were very much early adopters, while EVs are now attractive to a much broader audience.
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BMW has two fresh weapons against Tesla, the Model 3-rivaling i4 fastback and the iX SUV, which targets the Model X. Nota described the i4 as the “ultimate electric driving machine” and the “electric product that customers expect from BMW.“
The order books are already full for the i4 and iX, with US dealers having hundreds of orders for those two vehicles. Furthermore, the order time now at around six months, Nota said.
The i4 and iX are just the beginning of BMW’s US electric offensive. Three more BMW Group EVs will be coming stateside over the next two years: the i7 flagship sedan later this year, followed by the i5 large sedan and all-electric MINI Countryman in 2023.
Pieter Nota’s optimistic statements were echoed by BMW CEO Oliver Zipse.
“We will push the company to the limits of production capability. Demand will be surging. We already see that with the iX, with the i4.”
For the first two months of 2022, BMW had 54,210 new-vehicle registrations in the US (ICE+EV), compared to Tesla’s 71,250, according to data from the financial information company Experian.
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