We all have strange leftover habits and items that don’t really serve us anymore. Landline phone jacks in kitchens. Mailboxes full of mail we instantly recycle, not having received useful physical mail all year. Stored phone numbers of people we vaguely remember.
For BMW, it’s the letter “i.” It shows up in many BMW vehicle names – 330i, 540i xDrive, X7 M60i. It hangs off the end there. Just a li’l appendix. No purpose.
It meant something once. BMW introduced the i in the 1970s when it moved from carburetors to fuel injection. But the letter continued to appear long after every car on the market had fuel injectors, even though it told shoppers nothing useful.
In recent years, BMW confused the issue. When the brand started going electric, it used the lowercase “i” to denote an electric model. The 2024 BMW i4 is, roughly speaking, an electric 4 Series. It even uses the same body style. An i7 is an electric 7 Series.
It’s all a little confusing.
So BMW is making a change. Bernd Körber, BMW senior vice president, brand and product management, told BMWBlog that BMWs with gas-powered engines will soon lose the i from the end of their names.
“Historically,” Körber said, “our interpretation of BMW i was always different, it’s more innovation, not necessarily only electric, and we historically had injection at the end.”
But injection is no longer special. Innovation is. So, Körber said, the brand will “keep ‘i’ as an asset, and we would like to keep it as a signature to indicate you’re driving an electric car.”
The i-excision will reportedly begin with the upcoming 2025 X3 M50, which replaces the X3 M40i as the most capable X3 compact SUV not built by the brand’s famed M division.
