June 22, 2026
BMW’s electric cars made up 6.6 percent of its China sales in the first quarter, in a market where 54.1 percent of new vehicles sold were electric or plug-in. That gap is why the company plans to stop building all three of its China-made EVs, the i3, i5, and iX1, in July, a halt first reported through Chinese industry channels and framed by BMW as routine capacity planning rather than a retreat.
All three cars leaving the line share one flaw. They ride on BMW’s CLAR platform, an architecture built for combustion engines and adapted to hold batteries, the kind of converted design Chinese buyers have largely stopped paying for. Together they sold 5,680 units in the first quarter. BMW’s total China sales fell 10 percent year over year to 144,000 vehicles, extending a decline that started in 2023 as domestic brands took the market.
What the Neue Klasse changes
A clean break replaces the workaround. BMW’s Neue Klasse line sits on a dedicated electric platform with an 800-volt system and the company’s sixth-generation eDrive, and the first one built in China, a long-wheelbase iX3, is due off the Shenyang line in the fourth quarter. BMW puts its CLTC range above 900 kilometers on a 108 kWh cylindrical-cell pack, with roughly 400 kilometers added in ten minutes of charging. A long-wheelbase i3 follows it, and at least six Neue Klasse models are planned within two years of launch.
China-market cars also carry something the versions sold in Munich do not. The local iX3 runs a navigation-assisted driving system co-developed with Momenta, a Chinese supplier, the same move Audi made when it built Huawei’s software into its China cars. Premium importers have learned that in China the software sells the car, and most no longer write it themselves.
The bet under the shutdown
Stopping production of an entire EV lineup in your largest EV market is a hard thing to call routine, which is the word BMW chose. The company is wagering that a stretch with almost nothing electric to sell is worth relaunching on hardware that can compete on range, charging, and software instead of apologizing for a converted platform. The risk is the calendar. Every month the Neue Klasse slips, more of a market where two-thirds of buyers now want electric goes to someone else. The 6.6 percent figure is the floor the new cars have to lift, and the gap between that number and 54 percent is the size of the job.
