Welcome to the Daily 5 report for Monday, Jan. 27.
More than 10 years ago, BMW embarked on a risky strategy to get into electric vehicles when few other legacy automakers were ready.
At the time, Tesla was still deep in red ink and few automakers were convinced an EV could ever be sold at a profit. BMW still forged ahead.
Today, Tesla is the world's most valuable automaker, CEO Elon Musk is the world's richest man and the rest of the auto industry is still trying to figure out how to make EVs profitable. But among the luxury brands, BMW is showing signs of progress, delivering 368,523 EVs globally in 2024 — a 12 percent boost over 2023. Mercedes' global EV sales slipped 23 percent and Audi's dropped 8 percent.
How did BMW do it? BMW executives, of course, will boast about the quality of their current and future EV lineups. But analysts instead think BMW learned from its early EV experiences.
This excellent story from Automotive News Europe says BMW benefited from its development of the i3 electric city car and i8 hybrid sports car. BMW launched the i3 in 2013 and for several years it was one of the top three EVs sold worldwide. BMW stopped producing the car in 2022.
"BMW has been building EVs longer than Audi and Mercedes," Hamburg automotive analyst Matthias Schmidt said in our story. "They have more competence and a slightly broader product portfolio."
Other brands continue to retreat from their previous EV strategies.
The latest? Alfa Romeo. The Stellantis brand has abandoned a plan to go all-electric by 2027 in favor of a multi-energy strategy, Alfa Romeo North America chief Chris Feuell said in this story by Vince Bond Jr.
The Italian brand previously said the Tonale plug-in hybrid crossover would be its last model introduced with a gasoline engine when it debuted in 2023, but Feuell told Automotive News the brand changed course in the last month. Feuell said the conventional gasoline version of the Tonale is starting to reach dealerships, and the company will try to hook buyers with a lease offer of $399 or less per month.
Meanwhile, we wrapped up our Automotive News coverage of the snow-plagued NADA Show in New Orleans over the weekend and our report is loaded with news. One of our more entertaining commentaries from the event was this piece by Nick Bunkley that should make anyone reliant on auto industry forecasts think twice about putting too much stock in anything any analyst ever has to say.
Rivian Automotive, another struggling EV startup not named Tesla, is accelerating plans to become a mass-market automaker despite the likely repeal of broad EV incentives by the Trump administration, CEO RJ Scaringe said in this story today by Laurence Iliff.
"I don't think we're particularly worried about any of it because whatever happens will be equally applied to all," Scaringe said at a preview of Rivian's new San Francisco showroom Jan. 23. "I started the company with the view of making highly compelling products and none of my decision to start Rivian had anything to do with what the policy was going to look like."
Looking ahead to Tuesday, we are going to boil down the five most compelling make meetings at the NADA Show.
That's it for today. Have a great rest of your day!
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— Philip Nussel, online editor
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