BMW to drop 'i' in model name of upcoming gas vehicles

Name changes are quite a common thing when it comes to automobiles. Sometimes, it’s being done for better marketing of the vehicle for a certain region, or for the sake of standardizing the identity of a model from a regional scale to a global scale.

BMW is the latest to make a change in the naming conventions of their models. While it’s not as dramatic as turning Strada to Triton or XV to Crosstrek, the single letter involved will change the way we’ll identify one BMW from another.

We’re talking about the ‘I’ moniker for BMW vehicles. An executive from the brand has confirmed to BMWBlog that they are gradually retiring the ‘I’ from the end of model names of their gas-powered cars. While it’s going away from its petrol cars, BMW intends to continue using the “I” for its EVs.

“Historically, even though our interpretation of BMW i was always different, it’s more innovation, not necessarily only electric, and we historically had injection at the end of the badge, we said, we would like to keep ‘i’ as an asset, and we would like to keep it as a signature to indicate you’re driving an electric car and that was the logic that we had”, said Bernd Körber, Senior Vice President BMW Brand and Product Management, Connected Company to BMWBlog.

Originally, the ‘I’ letter was used by BMW to differentiate its carbureted and fuel-injected models. Nowadays, if you see an ‘I’ at the end of the model name, that particular BMW model has a gas-powered engine, and the diesels are identified with the "D" suffix.

But at the same time, we all know that BMW has now fully established the “I” prefix to identify its electric vehicles such as the i4, the i5, and the iX. With a gas-powered 530i co-existing with a fully electric i5, we get that it could indeed confuse customers.

The name change will apparently begin with the next-generation X3 M50, which will replace the M40i. Afterwards, this will gradually roll out to the rest of the BMW gas-powered vehicle lineup.

Source: BMWBlog