The expectation comes when the company bets heavily on its revamped electric vehicle offering.

"There will be a selection process in our industry," Zipse told the Spiegel news magazine.

This, he said, was why the German carmaker decided five years ago to overhaul its portfolio with the new, fully electric  Neue Klasse  series, with which it hopes to catch up with EV pioneer Tesla.

"You can t afford to make mistakes in this industry," Zipse told the magazine, speaking ahead of BMW s unveiling of the first model in the series, the iX3, at the Munich car show next week.

Spiegel quoted an industry specialist on the risk of BMW s  Neue Klasse  strategy.

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For a relatively small producer like BMW, it is "enormously important that such a billion-euro investment doesn t go down the drain", said Stefan Bratzel, head of the Centre of Automotive Management.