BMW has sold two million electric cars, and Europe bought seven in ten of the ones it shifted last quarter

BMW has delivered its two millionth fully electric vehicle, an i5 M60 xDrive built at Dingolfing and handed to a customer in Spain. Europe accounted for 81,445 of the 116,807 battery-electric cars the group sold in the second quarter.

BMW has handed over its two millionth fully electric car. The i5 M60 xDrive was built at Dingolfing in Bavaria and delivered to a customer in Spain, BMW said in a statement.

The count runs back to 2013. Including plug-in hybrids, the group has delivered around 3.5 million electrified vehicles.

Recent growth is almost entirely European. Europe took 81,445 of the 116,807 battery-electric cars BMW sold in the second quarter, as electrive calculated from the group’s half-year figures.

That is seven in ten. The rest of the world, China and the United States included, accounted for roughly 35,000 cars between them.

The wider direction is down. Group deliveries of battery-electric vehicles fell 7.4% in the first half to 204,295, and sales in China dropped more than 20%. Chinese carmakers have meanwhile taken a record share of the European market.

So the milestone marks a rearrangement rather than a surge. BMW is not selling more electric cars than it did a year ago, it is selling far more of them in one region.

The iX3 is doing most of that work. Nearly 100,000 orders have arrived since launch, and one in three electric BMWs ordered in Europe is an iX3. Roughly half of all X3 orders are now for the electric version.

European buyers are further along than the group average as well. Battery-electric cars were 28% of BMW’s European sales in the first half, in a market where kerbside charging is still being retrofitted street by street.

The next model is already on the line. Series production of the i3 started at Munich in August, on the same Neue Klasse platform as the iX3.

BMW is reading the numbers as vindication. Selling two million battery-electric cars “underlines how BMW and MINI models are winning over customers worldwide“, said Jochen Goller, the board member for customer, brands and sales.

Worldwide is the word doing the work in that sentence. InsideEVs put it more plainly, that the iX3 is carrying the team, and the team is largely European.

Which leaves BMW with an unusual kind of exposure. A German plant, a Spanish customer and a European order book now underwrite a product line the company sells everywhere else.