BMW Halts Development of Trailer Attachment with Extra EV Batteries

BMW showed the funky ‘pretertype’ to visitors at the BMW exhibition center in Munich, and it quickly got shut down.

Have you ever stopped to think about how much it costs a company like BMW to bring a vehicle to market? First, a team of brainstormers must listen to customers’ feedback or come up with clever ideas of products/vehicles themselves. Then, the real race to market begins, and of course, it isn’t cheap.

According to Automotive News, BMW has come up with a term for the prototype of a prototype and it’s called a “Pretertype.” Yes, a pretertype preceeds the prototype. Rainer Daude, head of BMW’s forward-looking technology office in Munich told the outlet that a pretertype was designed to gauge interest before the manufacturer spends too much money on the project.

He went on to mention that not too long ago BMW sketched a trailer attachment that carried additional EV (electric vehicle) batteries and showed it to the general public. This attachment could be hooked up to EV vehicles so they could carry more batteries on long trips. The trailer even had sleeping quarters above it, which would appeal to a specific adventurous group of folks and terminate “range anxiety.”

As you can imagine, the good people of Germany said, “No way.”

“Asians were polite, Europeans were more direct, but the response was the same: No one liked it,” he said. For obvious reasons of course. While we’re not quite sure of the specifics behind this, we would imagine that towing additional weight would drain the vehicle’s batteries faster and reduce total range. As a result, carrying extra batteries could be counterproductive.

What isn’t counterproductive are BMW’s efforts to bring additional range and freedom to future electric vehicles. After all, that’s where things will presumably be in just a few years time.

Would you be down with the idea of a battery trailer?