BMW design boss says people will pay more for EVs … if they look good

The trick to getting people to pay more money for an electric vehicle is simply to make them look more desirable, and have more “wow” about them, according to Domagoj Dukec, Head of Design for BMW.

In line with previous comments from BMW boss Oliver Zipse, Dukec reaffirmed that BMW will not be following Audi’s pledge to phase out ICE by 2033, instead leaving it “up to customers”.

“Cars are getting more expensive because of electrification; the powertrain costs more, so either you get less car or it gets more expensive, and customers are not ready to pay so much more, just for zero emissions,” Dukec explains.

Oddly, it’s the BMW 3-Series (with only internal combustion engines) that has increased in price in Australia over recent years (prices have increased about 10 percent over two years) while its prime electric rival, the Tesla Model 3, has come down in price. Now the Tesla is outselling the 3-Series by more than two-to-one, although BMW is clearly hoping to regain some ground with the upcoming i4.

Still, Dukec says if you get the product right, the market will pay for it.

“So you have to think, how can you make a product so desirable that you buy it because you want it, not because you need it.”

Dukec points to the example of the iPhone and says clearly people could buy a cheaper phone, but they’re happy to pay more because its design, and image, are so desirable.

Already, however, there’s heated debate about BMW’s new buck-toothed design on cars such as the i4.

“What we need at first is an aesthetic attraction, everybody needs that moment, the stunning look, but it’s not like there’s a recipe and you just make it, you have to find out who the customer is for each car, and find out what is the ‘Wow’ for each,” he says.

“But just being wow is not enough, you need something deeper, so you need meaningfulness.

“For us our new strategy is we want to actually figure out again what makes people fall in love with a product.”

What makes Dukec’s job even trickier is that he has to deal with fitting different powertrains in his designs – electric, internal combustion and hydrogen at BMW – and extremely different customers, from Russia, to China and the very strange US of A.

“In the US, they’re still driving in cowboy hats, so you have to design your cars with head space for that, I’m serious! People in Europe wonder why we have to have so much headroom in our cars,” Dukec insists, dumfounded.

Similarly, he believes BMW has to deal with different global demands when it comes to the call on going fully electric.

“It’s not a decision that everyone would like to see (going fully electric by 2025) and we will make the decision based on what our customers need and want, and there are some customers who don’t care about electrification – in Saudi Arabia, Russia, the southern half of America, people don’t care about this, so why would you say ‘BMW is only electric now’?

“It’s not us who will be deciding when, the point will happen, when the customer says just give me an EV, I don’t need the combustion engine,’ but today that’s not the case.”

Dukec says he believes most people who are not car enthusiasts don’t really see the differences between EVs and ICE cars just by looking at them.

“Even a Tesla looks like a  normal car, and the digital interior a Tesla has  can still be done in a combustion-engined car, I mean really Tesla went for quite a classic look, it’s ‘I’m still a car’,” he says.

“And take our iX3, some people were blaming us, asking us why it doesn’t look different, as an EV, but our customers were saying ‘I love the X3, it’s the perfect product I would just like to have one electrified.’”

At the other end of the spectrum, of course, Dukec says he needs to provide cars like the more radical BMW iX, with its giant grille, for early adopters and “hip” types.

“For the moment it looks different, or strange, but you know how it is, the more you see it, it starts out as one of a kind, then it becomes more and more lifestyle, more hip, it turns up in a few music videos, and people will start to drive it because they want to be part of it – I think in two or three years there will be a lot of X5 customers going over to iX,” he says.