BMW wants up to 6 worldwide.Create 000 new jobs

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• “We can’t keep doing this forever”
• “If the infrastructure doesn’t keep up, growth will be stalled”

First Zipse spoke about the critical situation due to the lack of semiconductors. In some cases, BMW has to increase and decrease the shifts of its employees in production within a few days because the supply of the important component is so difficult to plan. “The short-term nature is a real challenge, but we are flexible enough to deal with it,” says Zipse. Due to the semiconductor crisis, BMW is also unable to meet the high demand for vehicles. For the electric cars i4 and iX there is “such a strong demand that it can currently take a few months longer.”

However, as Zipse explains, it was not just because of the semiconductor crisis that the topic of supply chains “came into focus”. Efforts to achieve greater sustainability also play a role here: “Where are the components produced? Where do the raw materials come from?Because of such considerations, BMW no longer sources cobalt from Congo, but from Australia. However, the manufacturer sees bottlenecks as with semiconductors “neither in battery raw materials nor in classic raw materials”.

“We can’t keep doing this forever”

Another big topic is the circular economy, a “megatrend”, as Zipse says. At the IAA, BMW has already shown a completely recyclable concept vehicle, the iVision Circular. “Mankind consumes around 100 billion tons of raw materials every year, almost all of which are taken from the top layer of the earth. For reasons of sustainability, but also from an economic point of view, we cannot go on like this forever,” Zipse explains the urgency of using raw materials more sparingly. It is true that one cannot “do without all raw materials, but we are increasingly reusing them”.

However, the marketability of a 100 percent recycled vehicle will be a long time coming. With the new class, the next vehicle architecture, which should be on the road from 2025, BMW is going “towards 50 percent”. The current bottleneck is the availability of recycled materials, explains the BMW boss. Here “the necessary scaling has not yet been achieved”. In addition, “coated materials that cannot be separated again are particularly difficult in the recycling process. This is why vehicle development is so important for subsequent recycling.BMW is therefore trying as far as possible to “do without coatings and rely more on mono materials”.

“If the infrastructure doesn’t keep up, growth will be stalled”

Zipse is concerned about the topic of charging infrastructure and its sluggish expansion: The market for electric cars “is currently growing rapidly, but if the infrastructure doesn’t keep up, this growth will be stalled,” says Zipse. In Europe, “the number of electric cars is currently growing five times faster than the infrastructure”. There is an urgent need for action here.

Zipse has good news to report about the personnel situation at the Munich car manufacturer. While other manufacturers are discussing job cuts, BMW wants to hire employees. “We are well on our way through the transformation, have prepared our plants for e-mobility and expect further growth in sales in 2022,” explains Zipse. That is why BMW wants to increase the number of employees by up to five percent. “With a current workforce of around 120.000 people that corresponds to up to 6000 employees,” said the BMW boss. In addition to a large part in global production, IT specialists are particularly in demand. “But it’s not just programmers. It’s about the application of programs, such as artificial intelligence. We are also hiring many new developers in Munich, for example experts in battery cell chemistry,” says Zipse.

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