Mini to be an all-electric brand by 2030
According to reports in the German media, the BMW brand Mini will only sell purely electric cars from 2030 onwards. The last Mini model with a combustion engine is to come onto the market in 2025.
Brand boss Bernd Körber already said as much in autumn 2020, but now the German news magazine Der Spiegel has reported that the decision is official and will be announced shortly at the presentation of the balance sheet by group boss Oliver Zipse.
Back in July 2019, Peter Schwarzenbauer, who was responsible for Mini on the BMW board at the time, hinted in an interview that Mini could become an all-electric brand by around 2030 – a target that brand boss Körber repeated last autumn. Schwarzenbauer, who has since left the board, explained at the time: “For Mini, the Countryman as a plug-in hybrid was the first step – it works much better than originally planned and shows that electrification is the right path for Mini.”
Now the BMW brand is apparently taking concrete steps to phase out the combustion engine. The last Mini model with an internal combustion engine is to be launched on the market in 2025. In 2027, half of Mini sales are to be achieved with electric models, before Mini is to become a pure electric car brand in 2030.
So far, Mini has only offered the Countryman as a plug-in hybrid and the Oxford-built Cooper SE as an all-electric model. As BMW announced in November, the successor to the Mini Countryman is to be produced in Leipzig from 2023, which will also have a purely electric variant. A fully electric Mini is also planned by the joint venture between BMW and Great Wall in China.
As for BMW itself, as of December last year, BMW is aiming to build “a quarter of a million more electric cars than originally planned” between 2021 and 2023. The carmaker wants to more than double the share of electrified vehicles in sales, from about eight per cent in 2020 to around 20 per cent in 2023, according to CEO Oliver Zipse in December last year. By 2030, more than seven million electrified vehicles from the BMW Group are to be on the roads and about two-thirds of these will have a fully electric drive, made possible with the BMW purely-electric car platform announced at the end of last year. According to the Spiegel report, however, Zipse is also expected to set higher targets for the electrification of the entire BMW model range at the presentation of the balance sheet.
With reporting from Daniel Bönnighausen, Germany
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