The general public discovered the electric BMW i3 at the Frankfurt motor show, and that was where the first customers booked theirs orders. Not a single car has arrived at a dealership yet, they will begin to get there in November. So it’s a bit early to say anything about how successful BMW’s first electric car is going to be, but it’s not.

Friedrich Eichiner, BMW’s Chief Financial Officer, told Bloomberg that the manufacturer already has more than 8,000 orders. This is huge! So much, that BMW is thinking about increasing production capacity. That’s the best news of the year. It means that the BMW i3 is straight away at the same level as the Nissan Leaf and the Renault Zoé, and that it competes for the title of the best-selling electric car in Europe.

More than that, if we look at Tesla’s booming sales, while those of the little Renault Twizy have collapsed, that nobody wants a Mia Electric, and that sales of the Renault Zoe have flattened, it seems the trendy but expensive EVs are more successful than the cheaper bread-and-butter ones. If this proves true, it will be the best news of the decade. We sure dream of a market with a large choice of affordable EVs, but that is a very long term goal. Today’s priority is that EV manufacturers are profitable companies, and that is much easier selling expensive products…