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A BMW i5 M60 xDrive has quietly written itself into the history books. Built at Plant Dingolfing and handed to a customer in Spain, the four-door saloon is the two millionth battery-electric car BMW has delivered since the original i3 went on sale in late 2013. Add plug-in hybrids to the tally, and roughly 3.5 million electrified BMWs and MINIs are now in customer hands. In the first half of this year, more than one in four cars the group sold ran at least partly on volts.
Europe is doing the heavy lifting. Battery-electric sales on BMW’s home continent jumped 38 per cent in the second quarter to 81,445 units as iX3 supply loosened up. Across the first half, fully electric models accounted for around 28 per cent of European deliveries. That is no longer a niche. That is a mainstream slice of a very large business.
The iX3 itself has become the brand’s electric bellwether. Since the car broke cover, one in three electric BMWs ordered in Europe has been an iX3, and within the wider X3 family every second order now goes to the electric version. Order books are closing in on 100,000. Jochen Goller, the board member responsible for customer, brands and sales, credits the Neue Klasse with pulling the whole electric ramp-up along behind it.
The next wave is already rolling down the line. Munich began series production of the new i3 saloon in August, and BMW says demand has been strong enough since order books opened to force a steep production ramp. That gives the range a Neue Klasse saloon to sit alongside the Neue Klasse SUV, which is precisely the one-two punch the brand has been building towards.
Step back, and the shape of the strategy is clear. BMW sold 2.46 million cars of all kinds last year, so two million electric deliveries across twelve years is a foundation rather than a finish line. The group laid the groundwork more than five decades ago with its earliest electric experiments. It now has the plants, the batteries and, on current evidence, the order intake to keep the graph pointing upwards.
