Cycle News

VOL. 52 ISSUE 14 APRIL 7, 2015 P63 first of many BMW electric two wheelers—in China give you a better chance of reducing the retail price through economy of scale, making it more appealing to customers there who already understand the advantages of E-vehicles? As well as those in Europe or the U.S. where you actually have to do a mis- sionary job on convincing people to give it a try? Firstly, we are totally on target with sales of the C-evolution, which is quite expensive and was always intended to set a footprint; and then see how the market reacts. As you know, battery development develops quite rapidly in a positive direction, so we have some reasons to think that this is the right strategy. We will indeed homologate this bike in the not too distant future for China. Then we can test the water there and if that testing goes in the direction that you just outlined, then we have partners there to enable us to respond. Making an electric bike is not too complicated once you resolve the problem with the battery, so I could well imagine doing so in the market where we have the biggest demand. If it's China I would not be reluctant to do so. But maybe it could also be another coun- try, in which case we are flexible enough to go where the economy of scale gives us the biggest benefit. As you say, the batteries are the big issue with electric vehicles of any kind. I remember when I discussed this with your predecessor Mr. von Kuenheim about four years ago he told me that at the moment everyone uses lithium ion batteries, but apparently there is lithium air and even zinc air battery technol- ogy under development which gives a much greater capacity, and thus range. And that this should become available in about 2022- 23 for civilian use. Can you update me on that from BMW's standpoint? The good thing is that we are travelling in the slipstream of our car divi- sion—the cars set the pace and BMW Motorrad get spinoff technology from them. So at the moment we use just one of the exact same battery mod- ules found in the BMW i3 car. We are much too small to talk about battery technology with Samsung or the like ourselves, but the BMW car guys are very strong there, and we know from them the pace of devel- opment of battery technology allied with costs. From this we are quite confident that it could be sometime in that range that you mention, in the mid-2020s, that we can ex- pect to have an even balance between the costs and per- formance of combustion and electric vehicles alike. And then we have a completely dif- ferent ballgame. Is it your ambition for BMW Motorrad to become the reference point amongst Western manufacturers for electric two-wheeled prod- ucts, as your car division evidently is for cars? Yes, it is my intention that BMW must set the pace in development of this kind of technol- ogy on all segments in motorcycles, as in cars. When the time is right—and that means when we have the right battery technology, with a range of 300-400km [186-248 miles]—I am con- vinced our industry will change, and we must be leading it. CN "IF I COULD GET A GS TODAY WITH ELECTRIC DRIVE I THINK I WOULD PREFER IT TO THE COMBUSTION VERSION. WHICH VEHICLE IS BETTER SUITED FOR ELECTRIC POWER THAN A TWO- WHEELER, WHERE YOU HAVE MAXIMUM TORQUE FROM THE VERY BEGINNING, AND CAN HAVE A VERY FINE THROTTLE SENSITIVITY?"

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