The German car manufacturer BMW presented its “Neue Klasse” project on Saturday, to respond to competition from Tesla and Asian manufacturers, very advanced in electrics, on the eve of the opening of the motor show in Munich Monday. Announced in 2021, the Neue Klasse (New Class) designates both the generation of a set of new vehicles and the electrical architecture on which the vehicles will be built, from 2025.
It represents “30% more autonomy, 30% faster charging, 25% more efficiency”, assured one of the group’s leaders, Frank Weber, in a press release. This new architecture, on which the group wants to build more than half of the models sold by the end of the decade, should above all allow BMW to increase its margins and remain competitive in an increasingly competitive environment.
In July, the BMW I3 was only the tenth best-selling electric car in Germany, far behind models from Tesla and Volkswagen, according to calculations by the Center of Automotive Management (CAM). BMW is one of the few manufacturers in the automotive industry not to have set a deadline for the end of combustion engines and to bet on hydrogen while continuing to work on traditional engines, while the roads of the European Union are preparing for carbon-free mobility by 2035.
In this context, the Neue Klasse must be a response to the success of Tesla and its Asian and particularly Chinese competitors, whose unprecedented presence at the Munich show demonstrates the desire to conquer the European market in the electric segment. BMW is “not late”, but it must “be good, because this playground is not empty, and about to become much more crowded from 2024”, summarizes Matthias Schmidt, sector expert .
