Trademarks Offer Glimpse at Future BMW Range

Buyers will have a much wider range of electric BMWs to choose from in the coming years, if recent trademark filings are anything to go by.

BMW has applied for several new trademarks locally in recent weeks, providing an insight into future electric models within the 3 Series, 4 Series, and 7 Series line-ups.

Specifically, CarSauce has discovered filings for the badges i330, i340, i430, i440, i740, and i750.

Almost exactly a year prior, BMW confirmed it would be dropping the ‘i’ from the end of the badges for its petrol-powered cars – after being introduced in the 1970s to indicate fuel-injection technology on some models.

In more recent years, ‘i’ has begun to be applied to its electric vehicles – at the beginning of badges – such as the i3, i4, i5, iX1, iX2, and iX.

Despite the letter ‘e’ being more commonly used to identify electric cars in the industry, BMW has instead used the suffix for plug-in hybrid models – like the 330e.

“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],” Bernd Korber, Senior Vice President of BMW Brand and Product Management, told BMW Blog last year.

“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.”

It’s believed the change will help buyers more clearly differentiate BMW models, with the i7 xDrive60 Sedan likely to evolve into the i740 in the coming years.