Oliver Zipse joined BMW as a trainee in 1991. He is leaving as the CEO who kept the company profitable through a pandemic, a semiconductor shortage, and the most contested strategic debate in the industry’s recent history — and who is handing his successor a platform, the Neue Klasse, that will define BMW’s products for the next decade.
During his tenure, he had a firm position on electrification which was very clear and consistent: BMW would build EVs, and it would keep building everything else until the market actually demanded otherwise. “E-mobility as the sole technology leads to a dead end,” he told shareholders in May 2025. He had been saying a version of that since 2021, when Herbert Diess at Volkswagen was publicly dismissing BMW as too slow, too timid, too attached to combustion. Diess is gone. Zipse is leaving on his own terms.
When Everyone Went All-In, BMW Held Back
In 2021 and 2022, the German premium segment essentially declared combustion dead on a schedule. Mercedes-Benz said all-electric by 2030 “where market conditions allow” — a qualifier it would later use heavily when it reversed course. Volkswagen put most of its future on the ID platform. Volvo promised full electrification by 2030. GM abandoned hybrids to chase Tesla, then spent the next three years rebuilding the hybrid lineup it had just killed. The German press was not generous to BMW during this period. Munich was behind. Timid. Too sentimental about pistons. We were also one of those people.
BMW’s answer was Technology Openness — combustion, plug-in hybrids, battery EVs, and hydrogen in parallel. No single correct answer. “Technology openness means following the markets,” Zipse said, “because markets evolve, but not all at the same pace.”
Sounds reasonable now. It did not sound reasonable in 2022 when he was saying it against the European regulatory apparatus, his own investor base, and an industry that had largely decided the question was settled.
What The Competitors Got Wrong
Volkswagen’s ID family missed its sales targets for years running. Cariad, the software unit VW built to power its EV future, became a cautionary tale — billions spent, years lost, products delayed. Mercedes repositioned itself upmarket under Ola Kallenius, trading volume for margin, and then found that China’s local brands had taken the mid-range it vacated and were starting on the premium segment. Audi has been trying to claw back Chinese relevance since 2023.
BMW beat both of them on global sales for most of Zipse’s tenure. It held the top spot in the German premium segment year after year, with Audi and Mercedes behind. And it was not doing this by ignoring EVs: 426,536 BEVs sold globally in 2024, up 13.5% year over year, across more than 15 fully electric models. Nearly one in four BMW Group vehicles sold that year was electrified.
The strategy was not to avoid EVs. It was to keep selling combustion cars to the customers who wanted them while building the electric products for the customers who did not. Simple in description, difficult in execution when every analyst and regulator is telling you to pick a lane.
The Neue Klasse: Not A Hedge
According to BMW, the Neue Klasse is not a hedged bet. It is BMW’s most expensive strategic commitment in decades — a ground-up EV architecture with its own round-format battery cells, its own software stack, and a brand new factory in Debrecen, Hungary that started producing vehicles in 2025.
The first Neue Klasse production model is the iX3. It will tell us whether BMW can compete with BYD and Nio on pure EV terms on home soil and in China, not just on the strength of the roundel. That answer is still coming. It lands on Milan Nedeljkovic’s desk, not Zipse’s.
Leaving At The Right Moment
Photos by BMW Group Classic
China is a different market than the one Zipse inherited in 2019. Sales there fell 13% in 2024, from 826,300 to 715,200 units, then another 12.5% in 2025 to 625,527. Q1 2026 brought a further 10% drop to 143,958 units — and the only reason that reads as anything other than a really bad quarter is that the broader Chinese market contracted 17.5% in the same quarter. BMW outperformed its segment, which is accurate and also not very comforting when the segment is shrinking.
U.S. tariffs took roughly 1.25 percentage points off BMW’s automotive EBIT margin in 2026. Operating profit in 2025 fell 11.5%, the worst result since the pandemic. CFO Walter Mertl said without tariffs, the company would have reported a profit increase. So the underlying business is sound, but the external environment heading into 2026 is genuinely unpleasant.
Zipse’s supervisory board extension was already an exception to BMW’s age-60 board rule. He turned 62 in February. Nedeljkovic is 56 with a contract to 2031. He gets the time Zipse no longer has. And Zipse gets to leave with the Neue Klasse in production and the multi-drivetrain call looking correct in retrospect.
The Legacy
Zipse joined BMW in 1991 as a trainee. He ran the MINI Plant Oxford. He did production planning for the whole group. By the time he became CEO he had stood on factory floors in Munich, Rosslyn, and Spartanburg. When he argued that in-house manufacturing capability mattered more during the EV transition than outsourcing efficiency, it was not a philosophical statement. He had spent twenty years watching how BMW’s margins got built, and he knew what would happen if that knowledge walked out the door.
The outcome: BMW kept generating the cash flow that funded Neue Klasse while competitors chased a super-luxury pivot that cost it volume in its most important market.
Nedeljkovic’s path through BMW is nearly identical to Zipse’s — trainee, Oxford, Leipzig, Munich, production board. The company clearly trusts the model, so we’re exciting to see how his legacy will play out as well.
First published by https://www.bmwblog.com
Source: https://www.bmwblog.com/2026/05/12/the- ... was-right/