Combustion engines here for ‘very long time’: BMW

The Australian
OCTOBER 5, 2018
PHILIP KING
Electric vehicles will never compete on price with combustion engine cars even if battery costs are cut in half, according to BMW’s development chief.
Klaus Frohlich, speaking at the Paris motor show, said the electro-mobility debate was ­“irrational” because it failed to recognise that internal combustion engines, even on the most favourable EV assumptions, would dominate to 2030 and beyond.
He said batteries were improving quickly but customers continued to baulk at the limitations of EVs and potential solutions, such as fast chargers, had issues of their own. “If you look at the CO2regulations worldwide, there’s an ambition to have a high percentage of battery-electric vehicles. The only problem is we do not find enough customers who want to drive an electric vehicle and face all the constraints,” he said. “We are prepared and will have the best functional, lowest cost drivetrains. But the world — Russia, Australia, the US and big portions of Europe — they will have combustion engines for a very, very long time.”
Mr Frohlich spoke after BMW chief Harald Kruger came out fighting in Paris on the company’s electrification record. Mr Kruger said BMW was leading the way on electrification thanks to its plug-in hybrids and pure EVs, with more than 100,000 sold this year, and confirmed it would have at least 25 electrified car models by 2025.
Other makers are delivering on their EV declarations: debut battery cars from Mercedes and Audi were unveiled in Paris as the European parliament this week approved a 40 per cent reduction in car emissions by 2030 and EV sales quotas.
This drew an angry response from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, whose secretary Erik Jonnaert said: “Consumers cannot be forced to buy electric cars without the necessary infrastructure or incentives in place.’’
Mr Frohlich said predictions that EVs would be price competitive when the cost of battery capacity fell to between €100 ($162) and €150 per kilowatt-hour were wide of the mark. With many EVs fitting 90kWh to 100kWh batteries, he said “the cell cost alone will be €10,000 to €15,000”. “You can produce whole cars only for the cost of the battery,” he said.
Electrification would be available on all BMWs by 2021 but its forecasts for 2030 suggest most cars globally would still have a combustion engine.
“A very optimistic scenario says 30 per cent of BMWs will be pure electric or plug-in hybrids and 70 per cent will be combustion,” he said. “If you assume that from this 30 per cent half of them are plug-in hybrids, then 85 per cent in our portfolio will have a combustion engine.”