BMW held a New Year event at the Opera House (they have been supporting the institution for years), where the price of the new i7 model and the strategy for the future were discussed, among other things. On the one hand, at BMW both globally and in Hungary, they are satisfied with the year 2022, despite many difficulties. Worldwide, a 4.8% increase was achieved in terms of cars sold, the number of fully electric cars handed over doubled, last year a total of 217,755 such vehicles were sold. The goal is for 15% of the cars sold to be electric this year, and the iX1, which will replace the discontinued i3, can play a decisive role in this. The first units will soon appear in Hungary.
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Electromobility is still an important part of BMW’s strategy, by the end of 2023, 90% of the segments covered by the manufacturer will have an electric drive option, while the Neue Klasse platform, for which a car will probably be built for the first time in 2025, is being prepared at full steam. The sales system will also change in the next couple of years, from 2024 the MINI brand will increasingly be on a digital platform, and from 2026 BMW will also move in this direction, but the details of this have not yet been announced.
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For the year 2023, the company is turning to two relatively new electric models, the i7 can already be ordered, and its base price of 52 million forints seems a bit steep because it also produces an internal combustion version, and the xDrive version of the new BMW 7 series 740d It will be available for HUF 40 million, and BMW itself estimates that although there have been a lot of pre-orders for the i7, the dice will soon turn and the diesel version will be the most popular. The other model is the iX1, which is a medium-sized SUV, it does not have any frills indicating an electric drive, it has the same recipe as the iX3, the customer gets the same space, driving experience, interior and exterior as they are used to, only the drivetrain changes.
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In addition to all of this, this year the new i5 will be launched, which will be the electrified version of the 5 series, but this is also a model that will also hit the roads in an internal combustion version a little later. Also this year, a purely electric car will arrive in the MINI range, but nothing else was revealed at the event. In any case, it seemed that no matter how the powertrain, IT and electronics are emphasized in every new BMW, the advanced driving support systems are already besieging the three-level self-driving in certain (mainly highway) conditions, although for the time being their usability depends on which what is the regulation in the country.
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In addition to all of this, it was interesting to see that, despite all the efforts regarding the electric transition, not a single electric model made it to the top 10 list of cars that will be sold (or already ordered) in 2022, which is led by the BMW X5 with 861 units, followed by the 3 is followed by 607 items. In terms of pure electric models, the iX wins by a towering height, of which 167 orders were registered in 2022, for the iX3 this number is 117, while 82 i3s and 81 Mini Cooper SEs were also sold, so that a total of 550 electric cars will be ordered in 2022 .
