BMW is coming for Tesla’s premium electric sedan crowd with a sharp-looking, ultra-luxe new i7 – and production began this week!
The first of the all-new BMW 7 Series and i7s have officially rolled off the production lines, and BMW fans will be able to choose from between a combustion-powered hybrid version or the fully electric BMW i7, with deliveries of the new 7 Series set to begin for customers worldwide this autumn.
This has all happened at the sprawling BMW Group Plant in Dingolfing, Germany, where BMW Group has invested over $312 million to get the plant ready for production on the new 7.
BMW i7 Assembly Line
The BMW i7 helps mark the brand’s next step in its electromobility campaign for the luxury segment. By the end of 2022, one in four BMWs coming out of Dingolfing is expected to incorporate an electric drive. This would encompass about 50% of the plant’s total output by the mid-2020s.
The 7 Series is an evolutionary result of previous technologies developed for the BMW iX, from individual features like the onboard network architecture and driver assistance systems to the entire production process. The assembly line is 100% flexible, with the plant being able to easily switch between drive variants for a given series.
Adapting and re-using production systems has saved BMW Group hundreds of millions of dollars (Euros?) thanks to this efficiency— and, given that Tesla’s Berlin plant is being shut down for more than two weeks to address quality concerns shortly after that company reported its first quarter-over-quarter drop in deliveries in years, it seems to us like the manufacturing know-how of companies like BMW and Mercedes-Benz present a very real threat to Tesla’s continued electric dominance, indeed.
SOURCE | IMAGES: BMW.
