Oliver Zipse announces increases in production of e-cars and more than twice as many sales by 2023.
BMW increases production planning for electric cars. “We are now again significantly increasing the number of electric drives,” said CEO Oliver Zipse of the Augsburger Allgemeine. “In the years 2021 to 2023 we will also build a quarter of a million more electric cars than originally planned.”
The share of electrified BMW vehicles in sales should more than double in the next three years – “from around eight percent this year to around 20 percent in 2023”.
Concern about charging infrastructure
The BMW boss described the currently still slow expansion of the charging infrastructure as the “central challenge” in electrifying road traffic. “In Germany there should be around seven to ten million electrified vehicles on the roads in 2030. Because every car has to be charged, a total of around eight to eleven million charging points would be needed – one million of which are public,” said Zipse.
“Starting today, 15,000 private and around 1,300 public charging points would have to be put into operation every week for this size. Unfortunately, we are a long way from that.” Therefore, his greatest concern is “in fact that our electric car offensive is being slowed down by the insufficient expansion of the charging infrastructure”.
Don't worry about Tesla
Zipse was self-confident towards the US electric car pioneer Elon Musk with his Tesla brand, which is currently building a plant in Grünheide, Brandenburg. In view of the high growth rates and growing market shares, he attested Tesla an “impressive entrepreneurial performance”, but also emphasized that the German manufacturers in the premium segment had a world market share of around 80 percent, which they wanted to defend.
“Let's look soberly at the figures for the first eleven months of this year in Germany: According to this, 11.9 percent of all vehicles sold have a plug, so they are purely electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids,” said the BMW boss. “And of this 11.9 percent, 0.5 percentage points come from Tesla. BMW is 1.1 percentage points here – more than twice as high.”
