BMW wants to sell 100,000 electric cars in 2017
That's not necessarily a pipe dream, per se, but it has a long way to go to achieve that goal.
Electric cars are coming, like it or not. Some companies are trying to get ahead of the curve, like BMW, which has high aspirations for electric sales volume in the coming year.
The German giant hopes to boost its electric car sales to 100,000 vehicles as early as 2017, Reuters reports, citing an interview with Harald Krueger, BMW's CEO, in German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung. That's a large bump in perceived demand, considering the automaker has pushed about 100,000 electric vehicles since 2013.
BMW currently sells one battery-electric vehicle -- the i3. In order to help it compete against a growing market, it boosted battery capacity (and, thus, overall range) by approximately 50 percent. At its current pace, the i3 would only account for one quarter of BMW's 2017 EV sales.
That's not to say batteries aren't slowly working their way into all manner of BMW vehicles. The company started offering iPerformance plug-in hybrid variants of the 3 Series and 7 Series in the US, and in Europe, it also electrified the 2 Series and X5. BMW also still sells the i8, a plug-in hybrid supercar that's neither practical (two doors, no back seats) nor cheap (it starts around $140,000).
Unless BMW has a radical trick up its sleeve in the next couple months, or unless BMW starts counting plug-in hybrids as electric vehicles, meeting the goal of 100,000 EVs sold in 2017 will be quite the tall order. Mercedes and Volkswagen both plan to unveil a slew of electric vehicles by the end of the decade, but BMW has been much quieter in regards to talk of future electric products.
The 2017 BMW i3 features a bigger battery and more standard equipment (pictures)
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