Just ahead of his elevation to the position of CEO at BMW in 2019, then production head Oliver Zipse spoke at an event at the Mini plant in Oxford about the need for caution when it came to EVs. “Flexibility is key,” he told journalists. “If we predict the success of 3 Series, we can be pretty much spot-on. To predict electro-mobility is much more difficult.” Five years later BMW is reaping the rewards of its more circumspect strategy.
“You have to have a compelling product roadmap and you have to have very flexible manufacturing,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said on the company’s second quarter earnings call. Ford’s van strategy has embraced that flexibility at its plants in Turkey, where the Transit Custom and related VW Transporter are built as plug-in hybrid, EV or diesel on the same line. Plenty of other manufacturers have adopted the flexible approach too.