BMW 2006 Annual Report Download - page 182

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Only people who ask the right questions come up with the right answers
What are the greatest challenges of the future for the
BMW Group? How are the fields of action defined for our Company?
As for all automobile manufacturers, environmental protection –
and thus climate change and, in particular, the reduction of CO2emis-
sions – is clearly in the foreground for the BMW Group. Not surprisingly,
therefore, the BMW Group is focusing on the following questions:
How do we deal with climate change? What does the drive concept of
the future look like? What does sustainable mobility mean?
We need to develop drive concepts with which we can achieve
a significant reduction in emissions and which at the same time satisfy
the customers’ wishes for contemporary,individual mobility.In view of the
finiteness of fossil fuels, we are clearly on the road towards the hydrogen
economy.
In ten or twenty years an automobile manufacturer will only be
able to operate successfully if the prevailing environmental conditions
worldwide permit individual mobility in a form similar to today’s. Failure
to consider this aspect would be a reckless way of dealing with the com-
pany’s own future viability. The BMW Group is committed to environ-
mental protection because a healthy environment is essential to our
existence. In addition to efforts to build more environmentally compatible
vehicles, the application and improvement of company environmental
protection plays a pivotal role at the BMW Group locations. It is important
to reduce negative impacts on the environment in the production
process and to minimise the consumption of resources. And even the
conditions in which the automobiles and motorcycles of the BMW Group
are produced must meet social and ecological standards worldwide.
>> 02 The road towards sustainable mobility. The BMW
Group has elaborated a three-stage energy strategy to meet the challenges of
climate change and the finiteness of fossil fuels. In a first stage, the fuel con-
sumption of the current vehicle concepts is to be further reduced in the short
and medium term.The BMW Group achieves this with highly efficient genera-
tions of engines, active aerodynamics, the use of innovative lightweight engin-
eering and intelligent energy management in the vehicle. Current examples
of this include new engines with High Precision Injection, but also innovations
for enhanced energy management in the vehicle, such as Brake Energy Regen-
eration or the Auto Start/Stop Function. In the medium term, the BMW Group
will introduce more innovations to reduce fuel consumption, ranging from the
further electrification of the power train to comprehensive hybrid solutions with
a high level of technical maturity. In the long term, however, the BMW Group is
convinced that the most sustainable technology is the hydrogen-powered
combustion engine.