A few days ago, Volkswagen Kanche obtained heavy news about MINI's future product planning from BMW's official office. One of the biggest highlights is that the MINI fuel version may be produced in Shenyang, and the new MINI pure electric version will continue to be produced by the beam car jointly invested by Great Wall and BMW in 2023, and there will be an imported version of THE model sold in the future.
In fact, BMW's plan to produce MINI in Shenyang has a long history. In July last year, a number of BMW Brilliance employees said that BMW Brilliance was launching a model production project code-named u28 and planned to produce MINI models on the China production line. Subsequently, in August, BMW China announced a 1.633 billion yuan acquisition of Zhonghua Automobile's production line. However, the production line is currently only for the production of fuel vehicles, and does not have the production conditions for electric vehicles.
Volkswagen Kanche learned that according to BMW's previous plan, the MINI model will be fully electrified in 2025 and produced by beam cars jointly established by BMW Group and Great Wall Motors. From this, we speculate that manufacturing MINI in Shenyang may be just a transitional solution.
For BMW, the MINI brand is in a new process of global expansion and electrification. Through beam vehicles, the BMW Group will achieve the two strategic goals of MINI's localization production and MINI electrification, and the innovative joint development and production model will bring scale effects to MINI and will also contribute to the electrification of the BMW Group.
For Great Wall Motors, bmw group is the leader in the automotive industry, through BMW's high standards and high requirements, Great Wall Motors will achieve self-improvement, in meeting the requirements of the global market and make great progress in meeting the requirements and regulations of the global market.
At present, there is not much information on beam cars to be released. According to previous media reports, the first model produced by Beam Auto may be an electric vehicle based on the MINI ROCKETMAN concept car. The car may be officially unveiled in 2022, and there are already media photos of the car's camouflage test car. According to the plan, the model will only be produced in China, but it will be exported to the world for sale in the future.
Kanche said:
According to the sales data previously released by the BMW Group, the MINI brand delivered 30,546 vehicles in China in 2021, an increase of 5.2% year-on-year, providing important sales support for the group. At present, MINI series models in the country have MINI COOPER, MINI COUNTRYMAN, MINI COUPE, MINI CLUBMAN, MINI JCW and other products, Volkswagen Kanche speculation may eventually enter the domestic system may be some of the main sales models, the price will certainly be further reduced, so that MINI sales in China further increased.