Recently, several automakers have announced plans to go fully electric by 2030 at the latest, with some brands like Ford aiming at an earlier conversion. Yet, German brands have been oddly quiet about full electric conversions, especially BMW, who actually reinforced the idea of using internal combustion recently. However, the suits in Munich must have heard the criticism of such decisions and have decided to meet some critics halfway and switch the MINI brand entirely over to electrification by 2030.

According to a recent article from Spiegel Magazine, BMW boss Oliver Zipse claims that MINI will be the first part of the BMW Group to fully switch over to electrification and the ball will start rolling soon. In fact, Zipse claimed that the last internal-combustion MINI will debut in 2025 and that by 2027, half of the entire MINI range will be electric.

Apparently, BMW’s relationship with Chinese manufacturer Great Wall has a lot to do with this plan and could likely handle a lot of the manufacturing of said electric MINIs.

It also states in this article that Zipse will be announcing BMW’s plans to electrify the rest of BMW’s lineup later next week. As of right now, there’s no timeframe to when such a transition might happen or even begin for BMW. Hopefully BMW understands that it needs to happen sooner than later.

At the moment, the only electric cars BMW has on sale are the iX3 and i3 and neither of which are available in all markets and neither of which are particularly competitive. Plus, the BMW i3 is doomed, reaching the end of production as we speak. The BMW iX will replace it  and the i4 is on the way but BMW really needs to get a move on after that. Tesla obviously has its suite of EVs to contend with and now even Audi has three electric models, with all three boasting two different variants, with several more planned to debut by 2025.

Learning that MINI will switch to 100-percent EV by 2030 is very encouraging and, honestly, MINI is one of the best brands for electrification. Though, we would like to see more from BMW and hopefully we will within the coming weeks.

[Source: Spiegel]