“The big challenge to selling EVs is training” car dealers, Pieter Nota confided over dinner one night during the Munich Auto Show.
Nota, the board member of management at BMW AG, was talking about the company’s network of 348 distributors across the United States. He was speaking with a small group of journalists who had joined him for a Bavarian repast in Munich to celebrate BMW’s launch of its first-ever electric SUV and electric sedan.
Nota declined to say how many of the company’s new EVs it hopes to sell in their first year. But the power and resources behind them are staggering. BMW will offer a fully electrified vehicle in nearly every one of its segments by 2023, he said. By 2024, BMW will have stopped making internal combustion engines at its main manufacturing plant in Munich. By 2025, it will have invested more than $32 billion in EV research and development.
“We are hitting the market exactly when the time is right,” Nota said. “When demand is rising and when charging is making strong progress.”