Have the traditional car brands finally cracked the electric car market? Not brands like Hyundai, but the old-school, rusted-on follower brands like BMW.
Now that the 5 Series offers two out of three of its variants as EVs, BMW Australia Head of Product and Market Planning Brendan Michel told CarsGuide after a preview of the new i5 that he expects the turning point to be more obvious in terms of EV uptake.
“It’s probably too early to tell how the split is going to be between those three variants,” Michel said.
“Obviously, we’ve got the two BEVs and we’ve got the 40 which is equivalent to probably what would have been the old 40i engine we offered three or four years ago.
“And then obviously, the M60, the top of the range of which, more or less replaces the V8 in the M540i which has done very, very well for us in the past two or three years.
“And then at the entry price point is the 520i, we did offer the 520i and a 530i in both engine variants in the previous generation, very low volume on both of those, so we’ve merged those into one. The 20i gets a little bit more power and torque over the outgoing model. So we think that that’ll fill that gap between 520i and 530i quite nicely.
“On the quiet side, we do have very, very high hopes for the i5 40 and the i5 M60, but it’s a bit too early to tell what the split between those is going to be.”
It follows logic that the 5 Series, as an already fairly premium model, will lead more customers to spend on the higher-end EV side of the line-up.
BMW’s own recently-launched 7 Series has more than two-thirds of its sales as EVs, with 65 per cent for the 740i petrol and 35 per cent for the fully electric i7 xDrive60.
Michel told us that BMW “expects that figure to move further in favour of the BEV as production increases and [BMW] receives more vehicles in the country to offer customers”.
He said while the 5 Series is a model where the shift to electrification could become obvious, higher volume cars like the brand’s combustion SUVs are still far outselling their electric counterparts.
“Yeah, we’re starting to see [more EV uptake] but also, there’s our iX’s which have been in the market for a while now.
“Our X5 30d and X5 40i in that type of segment – in the large SUV size where iX is pretty much smack bang on the same sizes as an X5 – the X5 30d is still well and truly outselling the iX cars at the moment.”
For reference, BMW has sold 412 iXs this year so far, versus 1410 X5s.
“So whilst we do have them there is still a strong market for internal combustion engines in Australia at the moment… but we are seeing a shift. Definitely,” Michel said.
The increase in BEVs on offer from BMW is coming along not too long after the brand experimented with offering plug-in hybrid models, though sales for PHEVs didn’t exactly take off.
We asked if that’s the reason for BMW Australia not offering the plug-in 5 Series here, but Michel said that it’s less about PHEVs being unpopular, and more about the preference to wait for a fully electric car over a plug-in hybrid.
“I think our plan always was once we get more and more BEVs, our preference would be to offer fully electric vehicles here locally in Australia,” he said.
“But historically, even when we did the same pricing, we had price parity on the previous generation 5 Series. You know, we had 330e at the same price as 330 at one stage, but that didn’t help sell them here locally.”
He agreed that the mindset of the PHEV being a ‘stepping-stone’ made customers more likely to wait for a full BEV if they were going to need to plug in at all.
“That was obviously five or six years ago, but I think I think now with the with the new fully electric cars coming online, and we’re launching [5 Series] with two of them, like the 40 and the M60s, we expect that there will be a bit of a gravitational pull towards fully electric instead of the plug-in hybrids,” Michel said.
“Out of all the 5 Series we sold here last year in Australia, only four of them were plug-in hybrid.”
Deliveries for the BMW i5 will begin at the end of 2023, at the same time as the car goes on sale globally.
Keyword: Premium plugs in! BMW i5 could be the brand's turning point for electric cars in Australia