derBayerische January/February 2023 - 28

2 0 2 3 B M W i 4 G R A N C O U P E
■ (Above) Doesn't make you want to jump in a drive? (Center Top to Bottom) BMW has their Tesla competitor. Is this foreshadowing of things to come?
(Above Right) Enough room for two teen girls and their " stuff " .
The Jack Welch business management practice focuses on short-term
thinking. The resulting and predictable failure of such a practice are now
evident. General Electric, a healthy business when Jack Welch became CEO,
was delisted from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2018. And all the
companies that rushed to adopt the Jack Welch way of doing business, including
General Motors and Ford, are mere shadows of their former, robust selves.
Apple, on the other hand, focused on the long-term - conducting
experiments to test the market, releasing " crazy great, gotta have it " profitable
products that were a result of
those experiments, and creating
an ecosystem for their products
that made our lives and the world
a more perfect place. The same
year that GE was delisted from the
Dow Jones Industrial Average,
Apple became the first business to
have a trillion-dollar market cap.
Both companies are examples
of the Lutz Law that " The
Primary Purpose of Business Is
Not to Make Money " . Focusing
solely on the short term
consistently results in long-term
business failure. Long-term,
strategic focus consistently results
in robust, sustainable companies
that consistently offer products
that delight the market.
Such is the case with the
2023 i4 that we're evaluating. ■ (Above) The grill is functional!
28
Fifty years ago, BMW produced two electric vehicle versions of their famous
1600 series, the BMW 1602e, as pace cars to support the Summer Olympic
marathon. An electric motor that produced 43 horsepower (peak) and a 12.6
kWh lead-acid battery pack weighing 700 pounds replaced the engine and the
gas tank. The vehicles featured a rudimentary regenerative braking system,
but the battery pack could not be fully recharged. A " recharge " was achieved
by changing the battery pack. Ironically, while developed to support the 1972
Summer Olympic Marathon (26 miles), the vehicles had a maximum range
of 19 miles.
BMW continued their electric
vehicle development. In 1987,
BMW offered the all-electric
325iX, which featured a range
of 91 miles. In 1991, BMW
launched a purpose-built electric
vehicle, the E1, that had a range of
125 miles. Then in 2009, BMW
executed a test program that
featured leasing 600 MINI Cooper
EVs. These vehicles had a 100mile
range (coincidentally, the
same range as the 2023 MINI
EV!). This was followed by the
MINI-E and the 1 Active E.
In 2013, BMW debuted their
" modern " purpose-built EV, the i3.
Some of you may remember our
review of the i3 with range extender,
published in the SeptemberOctober
2017 issue of dB. While a
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derBayerische January/February 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of derBayerische January/February 2023