| There are many factors at play here. Technology: BMW's bet was on lightweight materials and less on battery technology as an enabler for ecological, electric vehicles. Production is still costly and more complex than for e.g. the 3 series. Currently, there is only one plant that is equipped with the necessary manufacturing capabilities (Leipzig). Manufacturing: You need to adapt the assembly lines, which is not as trivial as it may sound. BMW's future platforms will allow assembly of EV's along ICE's on the same belts! At that point, you can produce EVs in all of BMW's plants (... with some modifications) Financial: BMW is not really making money with the i3, production is too costly. Given that BMW is a public company, you don't want to mass produce a product that eats your profit. Try to explain that to "traditional" shareholders that like their dividends. TSLA is an entirely different stock, which can do what it does due to its growth story. Also: Plants cost a lot of money build and operate. Stopping the production in a plant for a while to remodel it for a different assembly process as well (... not to mention the retraining of all the workers, new logistical processes). The magnitude is somewhere in the million dollars per day. Human factors: In German labor law, you can't just fire people. Giving up on ICEs means that you have a lot of people that are not qualified for alternative technologies and need to be retrained. This does not happen in days or weeks - at the scale of BMW this takes years and of course is happening. Sourcing: You need to source all the materials, incl. batterie. My guess is that BMW wanted to work with established players that know car manufacturing. However, that was probably a mistake given that e.g. BOSCH decided to quit (https://electrek.co/2018/02/28/bosch-gives-up-battery-cell-p...) Shareholders: We had the topic before, but BMW is special here that the Quandt family owns roughly 46% of BMW. Accordingly they have a major influence on all decisions at BMW. They act definitely not like an Elon Musk - they are very cautious and strategic. They also seem to act labor friendly and have a positive impact on the work conditions at BMW (... again meaning that they will make sure that BMW doesn't have to let go a lot of people). |