BMW Loves Diesel, so Don't Expect to see an All-Electric Lineup Anytime Soon

TopSpeed

By Andrei Nedelea

Published Oct 17, 2018

It will use diesel in its car in the foreseeable future

BMW makes and sells many diesel engines in Europe and other parts of the world that are not North America, and it doesn’t plan on stopping anytime in the near future. This point was confirmed on the sidelines of the Paris motor show by a high-ranking company official who also believes that generally speaking “the discussion about electro-mobility is a little bit irrational” in the current context.

His name is Klaus Fröhlich, and he is the Bavarian automaker’s research and development chief.

He said that BMW has a strategy in place in case EV adoption ramps up even more, but as things currently stand, "diesel development from BMW perspective is quite dramatic.” He added that he thinks BMW has the best diesel engines and the ones with the lowest emissions, arguing that “from a CO2 and customer perspective, a modern diesel is a very good solution. Especially for heavy, high-performing cars.”

However, in spite of this, he believes they will not make, for example, three versions of their six-cylinder diesel in the future (they now have single-, twin- and quad-turbo versions).

He also went on to say that the market for models equipped with the quad-turbo diesel engine is small and that it will be very hard to make that unit compliant with increasingly stringent emissions standards - this sounds to us like they’re going to drop it once the 50d has completed its lifecycle, and we won’t see anything as mad in its place. Today it powers mad performance diesels like the M550d xDrive we recently reviewed.

Regarding the prospect of an all-electric version of the 3-Series, he neither confirmed nor denied it, but added that the upcoming i4 model (which will be on sale in 2021) will fill that space in their range.

Further Reading