Loose Vowels: BMW could be renaming its entire lineup

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Most car companies would rather complete arduous and near-impossible tasks – fix their payroll, climb Mount Everest in sneakers – than change the model names of the vehicles in their lineup. Making such a shift often throws away years of carefully curated brand recognition, not to mention the expense of minting millions of new little chrome plastic badges.

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But it seems BMW is willing to try. The crack sleuths at an outlet called CarBuzz just uncovered a wealth of patents filed by the German automaker in that brand’s home country. The new monikers – 43 of them, to be precise – seem to suggest the company will be realigning its entire roster of vehicles, perhaps as part of the movement to a portfolio of electrified vehicles.

According to the report, the Munich marketers could be focusing on a trio of suffixes: e (electrified), d (diesel), and i (gasoline injection). These characters are already scattered about the trunk lids of BMWs like rice at a wedding but, if these new patents are any indication, a dose of organization is on the horizon. And we all know how organized German companies can be.

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At present, showrooms are stuffed with machines like the i4, cars which then have a suffix attached, such as eDrive35. The former is meant to be a model name, whilst the latter intends to denote the type of powertrain and where it sits on the totem pole of overall horsepower. However, patents associated with this story suggest a significant tweak to that ecosystem — and a whole lotta potential updated education required for Bimmer sales staff.

As an example, CarBuzz speculates the newly patented name “i750” could be referring to the existing i7 electric full-size sedan, utilizing a powertrain designation of ‘50’. However, if we go with that site’s own assumptions regarding the meanings of ‘e’ and ‘i’, the i750 should be a gasoline-powered vehicle. Also in the patent doc are the names “X750” and “iX750,” which likely refer to jumbo SUVs. Again CarBuzz suggests the latter may be an all-electric SUV, contrary to its own suppositions about gasoline and electric nomenclatures.

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Note that BMW has spent ages curating the letter ‘i’ as a prefix for electric vehicles, starting with the i3 and i8 before transitioning to the proliferation of that vowel for newer EVs like the i4. Switching the lot to ‘e’ could be jarring. Nevertheless, binning a new electrified sub-brand is not without precedent; it is rumoured Mercedes-Benz will eventually drop the ‘EQ’ shtick once its lineup is primarily all-electric. BMW could be musing the same.

After all, if a company is going to bin decades of name recognition, it might as well do it whilst making arguably the biggest transition – internal combustion to all-electric – the automotive market has ever seen.