The Bavarian brand is going to go through a pretty significant change in the coming years. By 2025, the lineup of BMW cars will be drastically different from the lineup we know today. Depending on your outlook, this could be either good or bad. If you’re interested in electric mobility and technology, this is a very good thing. If you want things to remain old-school, not so much. Either way, the Bavarian brand is going to radically regroup and change for the future.
For starters, we already learned that BMW would be replacing the current i3 with something a bit larger and a bit less high-tech. So instead of the i3, it will become the BMW iX1, which will be a fully-electric, front-wheel drive crossover that will be built on an aluminum and steel architecture, rather than carbon fiber.
We also learned that BMW and MINI will be creating a new small car that will be built by Great Wall in China. At the moment, such a small car will be built on the FAAR front-wheel drive architecture and be called the Metro Runner. The idea is to make something very small for urban cities.
There’s also the news that BMW will be developing 12 new electric vehicles between 2019 and 2024. But we already knew that. The real interesting news is what BMW will do after the i8 is gone.
Apparently, BMW will be making a new vehicle to replace the i8, internally known as “brand shaper”. That sounds like it will be a sort of halo car that shows off the best BMW can come up with. It will supposedly debut in 2022 and it will be either one of three different things: Option one is basically just a new i8 but with more juice, more power and more performance. Option two will gain drastically new styling and only keep its center structure. The third option could ditch the i8’s carbon construction altogether and get a multi-allow structure. This last option could also be a massively powerful plug-in hybrid, with a highly-tuned B58 engine and electric motors to combine for up to 800 hp.
It’s no secret that BMW is no longer the same brand it was in the ’70s and ’80s, where its only cars were pure and simple driver’s cars. While BMW’s are still great to drive and there are still many driver’s Bimmers, the way they go about it is drastically different and it will continue to change and adapt in the coming years.
[Source: Automobile]