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In view of the rapid development of the new energy vehicle market, including Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen, multinational vehicles have begun to develop exclusive platforms for pure electric vehicles, and one by one to achieve the launch of new platform models. BMW, which has always said it will not build an exclusive electric platform for pure electricity, has recently been "hit in the face".

Recently, during the analysis of BMW's third-quarter results, BMW Group CEO Chipze confirmed that the company is developing a new electric vehicle platform, which will be put into production at a new plant in Hungary after 2025, and BMW has set up a separate department to build the new platform in July. It means that BMW has previously said that it will refuse to follow suit, the strategy of continuing to use the oil-to-electricity model has been changed, and there will be models built by pure electric platforms in the future.

In February this year, when major car brands began to speed up the production and research and development of electric vehicles, foreign media reported that BMW said it would not change its established technological development route in the future. will not learn from Audi Mercedes-Benz and other development of special electric vehicle platform.

According to the relevant views expressed by BMW CEO Zippze, BMW's "integrated" platform can support both electric and fuel vehicles, and will continue to adhere to the electric vehicle development strategy in the future, so it will not follow the example of Mercedes-Benz Audi to develop its own electric vehicle platform to compete with Tesla.

The reason for this idea is that the re-development of the electric vehicle platform requires more money and energy. Udo Haenle, head of automotive engineering at BMW, has said: "in our view, the electric car market is too uncertain, so we will not build a platform specifically for electric vehicles, thus losing flexibility." We don't want the factory to have overcapacity. " Udo Henle also said that "it will cost about 1 billion euros to build a new factory, while it will cost 3 million euros to retrofit existing facilities so that they can produce electric cars in a common line."

Because of this, many multinational car companies choose to purchase friendly technology platforms with less money, such as Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz have expressed their willingness to share their own electric platforms.

However, with the gradual expansion of the electric car market, especially driven by European policy, the sales of fuel models have gradually shifted to electrification, and BMW has also chosen to make changes to adapt to the times.

After all, under the dual demands of environmental protection and low carbon, a number of countries have announced a ban on the sale of fuel vehicles, with the Netherlands and Norway banning the sale of all traditional fuel vehicles in 2025 and Germany announcing a ban on the sale of traditional fuel vehicles in 2030. In December, European Commission President Ursula von der Lane proposed a more punitive 2030 carbon target, which means that car companies must only produce pure electric vehicles to meet the requirements.

Although the way of changing oil to electricity can reduce the cost of research and development, such as BYD one platform, three kinds of power, supporting fuel, plug-in, pure electricity, poor sales of pure electricity and switching back to fuel models. However, the way of changing oil to electricity also has a great disadvantage, in addition to the model can only be more biased towards the design of fuel models, it is also difficult to be more biased towards the design of electric models to reduce their market competitiveness.

In this regard, as rival Volkswagen has successfully launched pure electric platform models, as well as Tesla's repeatedly soaring performance, BMW finally decided to launch a pure electric vehicle exclusive platform.

In fact, at first, there was a school in the BMW Group that thought that the advantages of the exclusive electric platform were more obvious, while the "oil to electricity" models launched on the compatible platform were not competitive and would be surpassed by electric car companies like Tesla. However, it was rejected by Chipze at that time and adhered to the established route, and today's plan for an exclusive platform is also a return to the original strategy.

It is just that the new pure electric brand will not be realized until 2025, during which time BMW will face various challenges. After all, with the explosion of demand for pure electric vehicles, it is up to the market to answer whether it will take a long or short five years.

According to BMW's new energy plan, five all-electric models will be launched by the end of 2021, namely the i3Magee Mini Cooper SE,iX3,iNEXT and the i4. BMW plans to sell more than 7 million new energy models within a decade, of which 2/3 will be pure electric models.

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