BMW CEO Oliver Zipse was recently asked about how the automaker sees the planned ban on the sale of new ICE vehicles in Europe starting at the end of the decade. Zipse was in the town of Nuertingen, close to Stuttgart, attending a conference and he made it pretty clear that BMW doesn’t necessarily agree with the ICE ban, but is complying anyway.
Zipse pointed out that BMW will be ready to shift to electric even before 2035 when the ban is to be enforced in Europe. In fact, he says BMW will be ready in 2030 and it will be able to offer a more or less complete range of EVs by then. Automotive News quotes the BMW boss as saying
We will be ICE-ban ready. If a region, a city, a country gets the idea of banning ICEs, we have an offering. The BMW Group is not worried about this. Whether it's a good idea is another question... but we will have an offering.
Right now BMW is launching the i4 and iX, although only the latter is a ground-up electric model built on a bespoke EV platform. The former is just a fully-electric version of the BMW 4 Series Gran Coupe, so it’s a transitional vehicle, but according to the first people who got to experience it, it’s actually pretty good on first impressions.
Back in March of this year, BMW also announced that it expects up to 50 percent of its entire global sales volume to be electric by 2030. The percentage is lower and more conservative than what other manufacturers have announced (Volkswagen expects 70 percent of its sales to be EVs by 2030, for instance).
We just drove the BMW i4 and iX in Germany
Source: Automotive News