BMW Will Drop The ‘i’ From Its Petrol-Powered Cars

A small letter ‘i’ first suffixed the name of a BMW all the way back in 1969, when the firm introduced its first fuel-injected car, the 2000 tii. Gradually, as fuel injection became the norm and all of BMW’s carbureted cars were phased out, the ‘i’ came to denote any petrol Beemer, with a ‘d’ suffixing diesel cars.

That won’t be the case for much longer. The company has confirmed to BMWBlog that it’ll soon be dropping the ‘i’ from its petrol cars, as it becomes an exclusive feature of its electric cars.

The change was confirmed by Bernd Körber, BMW’s senior vice president for brand and product management: “Historically, even though our interpretation of BMW i was always different, we would like to keep it as a signature to indicate you’re driving an electric car and that was the logic we had.”

The first car to see the change will be the upcoming X3, which will launch later this year – for instance, the high-performance M40i version will be replaced with a model simply badged M50. We can expect to see it applied to all of BMW’s other combustion models as they get gradually replaced.

BMWBlog reckons the next-generation 1-series and 2-series Gran Coupe, which will also launch before the end of 2024, will be the next to see the change, and that it’ll also apply to mid-life facelifts, such as the expected 7-series update in 2026.

It’s not clear if any naming changes will occur to BMW’s diesel cars, but eventually, we’ll only see the i applied to the beginning of the names of the firm’s pure electric cars, as it currently does on the i4, i5, i7 and iX3. Obviously, it won’t affect the full-fat M models either, which have used their own naming system since the M1 launched in 1978.