The advance of the electric cars proceeds relentlessly. More and more car manufacturers are setting deadlines after which they will stop selling thermal cars, to make room only for plug-in hybrids and pure electric ones. BMW is not one of them: despite announcing that 50% of global car sales will be electric vehicles by 2030, the German carmaker has not yet set a date from which it will only sell electrified models. Also Pieter Note, member of the board of directors of BMW and head of sales, he did not take a stand on the matter.
“Electrification is the heart of our group’s strategy and we have long been working for the mobility of the future – he declared to the microphones of Repubblica – Imagining the car as it will have to be in the next few years is easy, the problem is coordinate progress with production and the market. On the part of us builders it is necessary to act on several fronts; hybrid propulsion, batteries, pure electric, the use of hydrogen. Fortunately, the BMW group is equipped to manage complexity and we are confident that we will be able to reconcile the change with maintaining the necessary profitability ”. Note then reiterated the importance of three factors that are necessary to accelerate the diffusion process of electric cars: technologies, skills and clear objectives.
“Absolutely the speed of diffusion of electric cars it is inextricably linked to infrastructure. It is not just a matter of regulations: there will be markets in which the transition will take place more quickly thanks to the availability of infrastructures and markets that will inevitably lag behind – explained Note – In the announced plan we planned to sell 50% of electric vehicles in 2030, and this means that half of the production will still concern combustion engines, both must be taken into account “. The BMW sales manager then spoke hydrogen, explaining how it is by no means a shelved solution: “Hydrogen is a technology we have been working on for some time; the iX5 fleet just presented is the first step in a program that after 2025 will see the application in series for large SUVs, with all the advantages of rapid recharging compared to batteries. Currently, hydrogen vehicles have a higher production cost than battery-powered electric vehicles, but the price of fuel cells is falling and this gap can be bridged ”.