BMW’s Most Important Electric Car Is One Big Step Closer To Your Driveway

• The first pre-production BMW i3 electric sedans have rolled off the assembly line in Munich, the automaker announced on Wednesday. 
• The photos of the i3 (still wearing camouflage) give us our best look yet at the finished production-ready model.
• BMW plans to ramp up production of the i3 in the second half of 2026.

The camouflaged sedan pictured above may be BMW’s most important electric vehicle yet. 

It’s the first electric 3-Series sedan built fully at BMW’s Munich plant, which will be ramping up production of the car in the second half of 2026. That’s a big deal. The i3 is a battery-powered take on one of the automaker’s most popular and iconic models. As of Wednesday, it’s one big step closer to mass production.

“Production of pre-series vehicles is an important milestone for our plant,” Peter Weber, head of BMW’s Munich factory, said in a statement on Wednesday. “For the first time, we have built a BMW i3 entirely at our plant—using state-of-the-art manufacturing technology and digitally connected processes.”

Car companies go through several prototype phases before a vehicle hits full-scale production. Early cars may have hand-built parts or ones made on pre-production tooling. They may be made at some other location that isn’t the factory.

That testing process culminates in pre-production vehicles that are built on the vehicle’s actual manufacturing line. That allows a company to test out the final equipment, tweak its processes and get things moving at full speed. And that’s where the i3 is today. 

Once production of the i3 is in full swing, the EV will kick the combustion-powered 3 Series out of its historic home, where it’s been in production uninterrupted for half a century.

The photos BMW shared on Wednesday also give us our best look yet at the i3 sedan with its final production body, door handles, mirrors and lights. While many of the details are still obscured by the camouflage, we can mentally peel some of it away and draw some conclusions.

The first thing I noticed is that the front section of the vehicle isn’t as long as on the combustion 3 Series. The front axle is closer to the A-pillar than in the gas-powered model, giving the i3 the proportions of a front-wheel drive sedan. BMW could enlarge the greenhouse for extra space inside the cabin in the same footprint, thus allowing for more room in the cabin and extra space between the two rows of seats.

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Source: BMW

It also doesn’t look unnaturally high for a sedan, unlike the larger 5 Series (which also underpins the fully electric i5). It will likely be taller than the next-generation combustion 3 Series (which is also getting a Neue Klasse visual makeover), but BMW has done a good job masking the extra overall height caused by having a battery in the floor of the vehicle.

The wheels on the car are likely one of the designs available for the finished production version when it goes on sale later this year. The fact that they look so sporty also suggests that this camouflaged pre-production i3 is likely wearing the M Sport pack, which gives it different front and rear bumpers, deeper side skirts and a lower ride height.

BMW doesn’t show this i3 from the rear, but we can see the trunk area is quite high and squared off. Previous prototype sightings tell us the rear light clusters will be high-set and similar in design to what the iX3 has. The interior should also be pretty similar to what we’ve seen in the iX3, with its unusually shaped center screen and wrap-around display in the driver’s line of sight.

Under the skin, the i3 is related to the iX3, sharing the same 800-volt “Neue Klasse” platform. That indicates it will have similarly quick charging (at up to 400 kilowatts), a long range and deep software-update capability. The i4, i5 and i7 are good cars, but they use adapted combustion-car platforms that are inherently limiting. 

The i3 sedan promises to bring improvements in virtually every area over its BMW predecessors. There will also be a dedicated M model with an advanced quad-motor setup and piped-in engine sounds. All in all, the i3 is one the EVs we’re most looking forward to seeing debut in 2026—and it’s a big, big deal for BMW.

Updated Feb. 4 1 pm ET with additional context after the second paragraph