BMW wants its electric cars to catch up with combustion models by 2030
BMW’s electric cars have been handed another big target, but this time the company did more than waft a hazy promise of the future across the room. By 2030, BMW wants fully electric models to make up half of all sales. Right now, that share stands at 17.9 per cent, which means the brand needs to almost triple the proportion of battery powered cars over the next four sales years. On a presentation slide, that sounds suitably grand. In the real market, the hard work only starts there.
BMW is setting the bar high
In 2025, BMW Group sold 442,056 fully electric cars worldwide, giving them a 17.9 per cent share of total sales. By the company’s own reckoning, that meant roughly one in every six BMW Group vehicles sold ran solely on battery power. Add plug in hybrids and the total number of electrified vehicles rose to 642,071, or about a quarter of all sales. In Europe, the picture looked even more electric, with fully electric and plug in hybrid models already accounting for 40 per cent of sales.
Neue Klasse has to turn the promise into something real
BMW is counting on the Neue Klasse family to deliver the big leap. At its annual conference, the group said the iX3 had already brought this new era to market, and on 18 March the new i3 saloon joined it, carrying the same technical logic into BMW’s core segment. By the end of the year, BMW says customers will be able to choose from 20 fully electric models. The main plant in Munich will begin building the new i3 later this year and, from 2027, will switch to producing only fully electric Neue Klasse cars. That sounds less like a side project and more like the main plan, one the company no longer intends to slide quietly back into a drawer.
Smaller and cheaper models may arrive from below
BMW does not expect to hit this target with larger and pricier electric cars alone. Before the end of the decade, the range could gain smaller and more affordable i1 and i2 models, a hatchback and a saloon respectively, both positioned below today’s iX1. If that plan holds, BMW will finally try to cover the price band where premium brands usually talk about elegant compromises, even though the real reason often lies in the margin.
BMW is not burning old bridges, it is keeping them open
The important detail is that BMW is not tying its entire future to batteries alone. The group again stressed its technology neutral approach and will continue developing internal combustion engines, plug in hybrids, fully electric powertrains and, from 2028, hydrogen fuel cell models in parallel. In other words, BMW is not doing what some rivals once announced with great fanfare and later rewrote in a quieter tone. The Germans are keeping several doors open and calling it pragmatism. This time, it even sounds convincing.
BMW’s move looks more interesting because the car industry is no longer travelling along one neat electric road. Mercedes Benz pushed its full electrification target back by five years in 2024, while BMW is still keeping its 2030 goal of 50 per cent firmly on the table. The backdrop hardly makes life easy. In February, global electric car sales fell 11 per cent compared with a year earlier, yet in Europe they rose 21 per cent over the same period. So BMW is not betting on blind optimism so much as on the idea that the European premium buyer will move towards electric power faster than the wider market. It is not romance. It is cold arithmetic, which simply sounds better when there is a blue and white roundel on the bonnet.
