BMW Will Produce An Additional 250,000 EVs Over Next 3 Years, CEO Says

As if Tesla’s inclusion in to the S&P 500 and ARK Invest’s batshit insane impressive fund inflows over the last couple weeks haven’t been enough to make you consider a top in Tesla, the rest of the automotive world continues to close in on the automaker.

We have now officially seen electric vehicles from manufacturers like Hyundai, Volkswagen and Ford offering up “real world” competition to Tesla, who continues to struggle with quality control defects while focusing on getting their car horns to make fart noises. 

Now, BMW is throwing their hat in the ring – in a big way. The German manufacturer said this weekend that it plans to produce an additional 250,000 electric vehicles over the next three years.

The company’s CEO Oliver Zipse said on Sunday: “We already had ambitions growth plans and want to further expand our market position.”

The CEO says he has remaining concerns about Germany’s transition to electric vehicles will be slowed down by lack of charging infrastructure. He predicted that 15,000 private and 1,300 public chargers would have to be put into operation in the country, every week, starting now. 

“Unfortunately we are far from that. Therefore, the next big joint project in Europe must be to expand charging infrastructure,” he said, according to Bloomberg.

Recall, in the U.S., President Elect Joe Biden has already promised 500,000 new EV charging stations in the U.S. 

This will be part of Biden’s plan to help create “over 1 million jobs by investing in clean energy”, TechStartups wrote last week. 

The plan will mark a rapid expansion of EV infrastructure across the U.S., which had about 78,500 charging outlets and about 25,000 charging stations as of March 2020. It also means that Biden is going to have to convince Congress to continue to approve subsidies and tax credits, which have led to such wonderful wastes of money as Tesla’s Buffalo plant. 

The initiative appears to be part of a plan to stop China from “dramatically outpacing” the U.S. in its adoption of EVs, Reuters noted last week. As part of his plan, Biden expects to nominate former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm as his energy secretary. Granholm has experience in taxpayer-funded subsidies, Reuters notes; she helped secure $1.35 billion in the past to incentivize companies to make EVs and batteries in her state when she was governor.