BMW News

Although we try very hard to put cars through a variety of tests on a variety of roads when we carry out our first drive reports, it’s not always possible to gauge what day-to-day life would really be like for real-life owners. So when possible, we try to spend more than a few hours with a...

What’s the price of luxury green driving? If you’re BMW, and that luxury is the all-new 2013 ActiveHybrid 7 full hybrid, the answer is $84,895. With pricing just announced, the luxury hybrid is powered by 3.0-liter, twin-scroll turbocharged inline six-cylinder engine and a 40-kilowatt...

BMW has announced a strategic investment in Coulomb Technologies, the company behind the ChargePoint charging network. ChargePoint is the largest online global charging network, operating in 14 countries. The online network allows users to coordinate their charging via the cloud, with online...

While Europe has received diesel BMWs in four and six-cylinder guise for decades, U.S. buyers have only been allowed a small selection--which shrunk further when BMW discontinued the 2011 335d. That's about to change, reports Motor Authority, as BMW has confirmed it will soon offer a 2.0-liter...

Some hybrids, like the 2012 Toyota Prius, are designed out-and-out to achieve great gas mileage and reduce emissions. Some, like the 2013 BMW ActiveHybrid 3, are designed to entice existing luxury car buyers from their gas-guzzling models into slightly more parsimonious ones... while maintaining...

On Thursday, we brought you news that BMW was planning to ditch its partnership with GM to develop fuel cell vehicles, for Japanese rival Toyota. That news has now been confirmed, with a joint press conference on Friday heralding the start of BMW and Toyota's partnership. The automakers' Memorandum...

It's hard to keep things secret in the auto industry. So when Bloomberg reported yesterday that German luxury maker BMW had broken off talks with General Motors on joint development of fuel cells, writer Dorothee Tschampa explained why. It appears BMW jilted GM because it found a more attractive...

If you’ve ever visited central London in England and visited its famous Hyde Park, the chances are you’ve also seen one of BMW’s most prestigious showrooms, located along the highly-expensive and exclusive Park Lane. Now, weeks ahead of the BMW-sponsored 2012 London Olympic games...

If you want to know what's coming down the pike in German luxury cars, just watch Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Audi. Whenever one maker launches a new car, crossover, body style, engine type, or performance package...the others usually follow. And so it is with BMW, which reportedly plans to launch a...

Earlier on this year, we asked you if the 2012 BMW ActiveHybrid 5 was really green, or not? Now we've had a chance to drive it. Combining a 3.0-liter TwinPower Turbo straight-six engine and full-hybrid drivetrain into a 5-series body, the ActiveHybrid 5 looks just like any other premium 5-series on...

It isn't just big manufacturers like Nissan and Mitsubishi that enter the famous Pikes Peak hill climb in Colorado--plenty of individuals and independent teams take part each year too. This year, Electric Vehicle West, or EV West, is entering a converted electric car into the event, based on a...

Put most people behind the wheel of an electric car, and you can guarantee one of the first things they'll talk about is the silence. Unfortunately, that silence has led some legislators to require EVs to emit a sound in order to warn pedestrians of their presence, stifling one of the genre's...

BMW and Daimler have traditionally been rivals in the automotive world, but last week we learned that engineers from the two rival German companies have been working together on a joint project to design and test a safer, more affordable, more efficient electric car. The Visio.M project, funded to...

Nobody envies the country that follows China in hosting the Olympic Games. With huge, spectacular and immaculately choreographed opening and closing ceremonies to compete with, London has chosen a different tack for its games: Green. That's why the London Olympic organizing committee has teamed up...

This morning, the BMW X5 xDrive35d was named the 2012 Diesel Car of the Year by the readers of The Diesel Driver magazine. The BMW beat the new Volkswagen Passat TDI, which placed second, and the VW Golf TDI, which garnered third place. Altogether, 13 passenger cars and light trucks competed for...

Lithium-ion battery cells are expensive, challenging, and time-consuming to develop. And they can be hard to get right, as the current woes of A123 Systems show. Even the large car companies that develop their own cells--Toyota is the largest among a small number--want to spread their costs. Today...

London is making big claims that its Olympic games held this summer will be the greenest yet. To that end, it was announced last year that BMW would be supplying 4,000 of its low-emissions cars to the event, including 200 electric cars. The company has revealed that the first cars in its huge fleet...

Last week, we confidently predicted that we’d be hearing more about BMW’s first all-electric and plug-in hybrid production cars -- the i3 electric minicar and i8 plug-in supercar -- as we neared the BMW-sponsored 2012 Olympics. For the past few weeks, most of the news we’ve heard...

Last week, we were 90 miles north of the Arctic Circle, putting the Volvo C30 electric through its paces. But we weren’t the only people driving electric cars in the Arctic Circle as our colleagues over at Motor Authority found out earlier today. As our own Viknesh Vijayenthiran reports...

There are two different approaches to take when developing a hybrid. You can use the technology to make large improvements to the efficiency of a particular vehicle, or you can use it to improve the performance of a vehicle without making huge sacrifices in economy. The 2011 BMW ActiveHybrid 7 can...