Spider-Man on the dashboard

On 27 July 2026, BMW drivers get into their cars and a banner appears on the big central screen. BMW calls it a “special surprise”. Tap it and you get 19 seconds of Spider-Man, full screen, with music, while the ambient lighting pulses along. The campaign runs until 10 August, in more than 70 markets, on cars built from July 2020 onwards with Operating System 7 or newer. The occasion is the film “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”, in which the new electric iX3 has a part.

The reaction is blunt. On Reddit, owners call it tacky and hunt through menus for a way to switch it off. One jokes that cars now need ad blockers.

BMW pushes back. The animation, it says, is part of a much broader brand partnership that included product placement in the film and a special edition car on the red carpet at the Los Angeles premiere. “This was only intended to be a fun experience which celebrates that our vehicles are featured in the new movie.” And: “BMW has no plans to introduce advertising into its vehicles.” In Germany, the company told Der Spiegel it had received a great deal of positive feedback. What the partnership involves in money terms is not public.

That sentence about advertising is the most interesting part of the whole episode. In December 2023, Stephan Durach, who runs connected services at BMW, told a round of journalists that he could not picture selling the screen to play a commercial. “I don’t see it. It’s a private space.” In the German reports he went further: in his view, the car was the last private retreat.

Two and a half years later, Spider-Man is playing. Whether an animation you have to tap first counts as advertising is up for debate. The better question is a different one: what happened at BMW between December 2023 and July 2026?

The number beneath the picture

On 16 June 2026, six weeks before the banner, BMW cut its outlook. Instead of 4 to 6 per cent, it now expects an EBIT margin of just 1 to 3 per cent in its car business for 2026. The EBIT margin measures how much of revenue is left as operating profit, before interest and tax.

On 30 July, three days after the animation went live, the half-year report followed. In the second quarter, the Automotive segment's margin was 2.3 per cent, down from 5.4 per cent a year earlier. Group profit before tax fell 35.1 per cent to €1,697 million, revenue 7.9 per cent to €31.3 billion. For the half-year as a whole, the margin stands at 3.6 per cent.

The number itself is not new. In the third quarter of 2024 the margin was 2.3 per cent too. Back then the cause was recalls and delivery stops over a supplier's braking system, affecting more than 1.5 million cars. That could be explained as a one-off. This time the explanation is a market.

To be fair, two items belong in the picture. US tariffs cost about 1.25 percentage points of margin in the second quarter. Amortisation from the majority takeover of the Chinese joint venture BMW Brilliance in February 2022 cost another 1.2 points. The amortisation was the same a year earlier, and BMW was already paying tariffs then. They weigh on the level; they do not explain the fall. The second half brings another charge: the workforce restructuring that management and the works council agreed in July will cost up to 1.25 points of margin in 2026, according to the report. It is already in the outlook.

The yardstick is something else. BMW's long-term target range for the car business is 8 to 10 per cent. In 2021 the margin was 10.3 per cent, in 2023 9.8. Then 6.3 per cent in 2024 and 5.3 per cent in 2025. At its capital markets day at the end of September, BMW pushed the return to that range out to “the start of the next decade”. As an interim step it names 3 to 5 per cent for 2028.

Three times in three years, BMW has lowered its margin guidance for the current year. In September 2024, from 8 to 10 per cent down to 6 to 7. In October 2025, to the bottom of its 5 to 7 per cent range. In June 2026, from 4 to 6 per cent down to 1 to 3. Each time, China was among the reasons. BMW plans to publish its third-quarter figures in early November; they are not in this piece yet.

Where the money was made

In 2021, BMW delivered 846,237 cars in China, more than ever before. One in three cars went to China in 2021. Buyers there wanted exactly what BMW did best: a combustion car with a premium promise.

By 2025 the figure was 625,527, more than a quarter below 2021. That was in a year when China's passenger car market grew by 4 per cent to 23.78 million vehicles, according to preliminary figures from the industry association CPCA. 54 per cent of them were electric or plug-in hybrids. In April 2026 that share went above 60 per cent for the first time.

In China, BMW mostly sells combustion cars. According to the half-year presentation, as reported by bimmertoday, electrified cars made up 9.8 per cent of BMW's Chinese sales in the second quarter of 2026.

In March, BMW still expected Chinese sales “roughly at the previous year's level”. It did not turn out that way. In the first half, deliveries there fell 20.4 per cent, in the second quarter alone 30.2 per cent. In the third quarter BMW delivered 114,355 cars in China, 24.8 per cent fewer than a year earlier. January to September: 376,128, down 21.8 per cent. Only a little over one in five of the group's cars now goes to China.

One caveat. In the first half of 2026, the Chinese market as a whole shrank by 20.2 per cent, BMW says, almost exactly as much as BMW. The company writes that its market position remained “relatively stable”. For this half-year, that holds. BMW lost its 2021 position earlier, in the years when the market was growing and going electric.

Europe and the US are holding up. In the first half, BMW grew 5.4 per cent in Europe and 3.9 per cent in the US. That will not be enough to offset China and the rest of Asia, the half-year report says itself.

Two ways back to a margin

Every company cuts costs in a crisis; more on that later. To bring in more money, there are two routes. One takes time: better products, shorter development cycles, software you control yourself. The other works at once: get more out of what has already been sold.

BMW has tried the second route before, and in good times. In July 2022, in a year with an 8.6 per cent margin, its ConnectedDrive Store listed features to buy after purchase: seat heating at €17 a month, €270 for three years or €385 for good, steering wheel heating at €10 a month. This was hardware already in the car. The heating wires were fitted. They were switched on for a fee.

In September 2023 BMW backed down. Sales chief Pieter Nota told Autocar that people felt they were paying twice. Subscriptions for software features such as driving and parking assistants, on the other hand, BMW wanted to expand. Three months later came the line about the private space.

Two things follow. The idea of earning money from a car already sold is not an emergency measure. It is older than the crisis. And customers have rejected it once already, clearly enough for BMW to give in.

In 2026 the screen comes back as space. Spider-Man brings in no subscription revenue. It uses something BMW does not have to buy: the attention of people who have already paid for their car, for a car BMW still wants to sell. The logic is the same as with the seat heating. The hardware sits in the customer's garage, the customer has paid for it, and the manufacturer keeps the key.

What a company saves internally, the customer never sees. What it does with their screen, they see every morning.

This is where a balance-sheet question becomes a brand question. And the timing makes it worse. At a 9.8 per cent margin, a film partnership would have looked like play. At 2.3 per cent it looks like reaching for whatever is left. The same campaign, a different balance sheet, a different meaning.

Savings no one sees

The first part of the answer to the margin is invisible to customers. By the end of 2027, BMW aims to cut up to 8,000 jobs, in Germany and elsewhere. A spokesman confirmed the figure; how many it will actually be is open. There will be no compulsory redundancies. Both sides have to agree: severance, partial retirement, natural turnover. Production is excluded; the cuts are aimed mainly at administration and development. From 2028 the programme is reported to save around €1 billion a year.

When the offers went live in early October, the staff portal was briefly overwhelmed, according to Bavarian broadcaster BR. BMW paused the programme and confirmed strong interest.

At the capital markets day at the end of September came further steps: management structures 20 per cent leaner, a more focused model range, more production in the regions where cars are sold. BMW wants to decide on further measures by spring 2027.

That is cost management, and hard on those affected. It changes nothing about why someone in Shanghai chooses a car.

Success, administered

Since 14 May 2026, Milan Nedeljković has run the group. He joined BMW as a trainee in 1993, ran the Leipzig and Munich plants, and had been the board member for production since 2019. His predecessor Oliver Zipse spent 35 years at the company.

This is not a verdict on people. It describes a system that fills its top from within, and for a long time there were good reasons for that. From the mid-nineties to around 2020, the German premium carmaker had a recipe that worked: build combustion cars that drive better than the others, sell them in China, where demand for premium cars grew for years, and keep the margin inside the range. Whoever rose in that period rose by making known processes better. That is a real skill. Excellent production is no small thing.

In those years, success was not a hypothesis to be tested. It was a state to be administered. A company that is right for a long time builds structures that treat deviation as risk. A proposal that questions the recipe has to argue against thirty years of evidence.

Untouchability is not a character flaw. It is something learned. A company that wins for a long time learns that its assumptions are right.

BMW still builds very good cars. But the standards Chinese buyers judge by have shifted, towards electric drive and software. Anyone inside who wanted to push that through had to do it while the numbers were still good. By the time they were not, it was too late for new products. What was left was the balance sheet.

The picture is not complete, and that belongs in it. With the Neue Klasse, BMW is taking the long route. The electric iX3 has been on sale in Europe since March. In the second quarter, BMW's electric sales in Europe rose 37.9 per cent, and more than half of all X3 orders are electric, according to the half-year report. For China there is a long-wheelbase version, with a voice assistant built on models from Alibaba and DeepSeek and around 70 per cent locally developed software. Deliveries there are due to start in November. That is the first route. It began when the margin had already halved.

Not an isolated case

If the diagnosis is right, it should show at the neighbours too. It does.

Mercedes-Benz sold 86,800 cars in China in the third quarter of 2026, 31 per cent fewer than a year before.

Volkswagen demoted its software unit Cariad to a coordinator in autumn 2025. Founded in 2020, it had grown to around 6,000 people. The software architecture of future models now comes from the joint venture with the US carmaker Rivian; driver assistance for electric cars in China comes from Xpeng from 2026. A group that masters engines, gearboxes and chassis on its own buys in the operating system of its cars. You can call that pragmatic. You can also see five years of trying to build the new with the methods of the old.

The same movement runs the other way. BYD registered 26,252 cars in Germany in the first half of 2026, up 315 per cent on a year earlier, according to Federal Motor Transport Authority data. And BMW's own half-year report notes that Chinese cars are increasingly sold in other Asian markets too, making competition there tougher.

The difference between the two sides is less the price than the clock. The new makers have no thirty years of evidence that their recipe works. They have a market that tells them every month whether they guessed right. Having no history is their handicap, and right now their biggest advantage.

What follows

Cars are just the case where the pattern can be read off quarterly figures. It has three marks, and all three are in BMW's own reports.

The margin falls before the volume does. Between 2021 and 2025, BMW's worldwide deliveries barely moved, 2.52 and 2.46 million cars. Over the same period the margin halved. Existing customers are loyal; the margin shows earlier what the market will still pay for a product of its own accord.

New revenue comes from the installed base rather than the product. A fee for something that used to be included is a finding. It says there is nothing new right now that anyone would pay extra for.

And the language changes. For 2021, BMW reported records and raised its dividend to €5.80. In 2026 it reports ranges, severance and leaner structures. The question such a company can be measured by is simple: when did it last sell something that did not exist before? For BMW the answer right now is: since March, in Europe. In China, from November.

The 19 seconds

It would be too easy to write the animation off as a blunder. A blunder would mean nobody thought about it. But somebody did. Somebody weighed what that space was worth and concluded it was worth more than the line about the private space.

That is a legitimate decision. At a 2.3 per cent margin it is even understandable.

It is also an admission. Whoever uses the screen in a car already sold as a channel treats the owner as an audience. And whoever paid for a premium car paid for more than performance. They paid for the car being theirs.

How I worked it out

All margins are EBIT margins of the Automotive segment as BMW reports them: profit before financial result and taxes divided by segment revenue. Annual figures: 2.7 per cent for 2020 and 10.3 per cent for 2021 from the results release of March 2022, 8.6 and 9.8 per cent for 2022 and 2023 from the release of March 2024, 6.3 and 5.3 per cent for 2024 and 2025 from the annual conference release of 12 March 2026. Quarter and half-year 2026, group profit, revenue, the tariff burden, the purchase price allocation for BMW Brilliance and the restructuring charge come from the half-year report to 30 June 2026, note 22. The 2.3 per cent in the third quarter of 2024 is given by CFO Walter Mertl in his speech of 6 November 2024. Excluding the BMW Brilliance amortisation, the margin then was 3.5 per cent.

Targets and guidance: 8 to 10 per cent long term and 3 to 5 per cent for 2028 from the capital markets day of 29 and 30 September 2026. Guidance cuts: 10 September 2024, 7 October 2025 as an ad hoc announcement, here via Automotive World, and 16 June 2026. The 5 to 7 per cent range for 2025 is cited in the 2026 annual conference release.

Deliveries in China, BMW and MINI: 777,379 in 2020, 846,237 in 2021, 791,985 in 2022 and 824,932 in 2023, 714,530 in 2024, 625,527 in 2025, each from the January sales release. The 2022 figure is the prior-year value in the 2023 release. Since 2026 BMW reports by sales region and has restated prior-year figures. 2026: half-year report and the sales release of 13 October 2026. Delivery figures are provisional. China's share of worldwide deliveries is my own calculation: 33.6 per cent in 2021 (846,237 of 2,521,514), 25.4 per cent in 2025 (625,527 of 2,463,715), 22.0 per cent for January to September 2026 (376,128 of 1,707,799). “A quarter fewer” stands for minus 26.1 per cent from 2021 to 2025.

Chinese market: retail figures from the CPCA, preliminary for 2025. The 9.8 per cent electrified share of BMW's Chinese sales in the second quarter of 2026 comes from a slide in the half-year presentation, as reproduced by bimmertoday. The half-year report itself does not give it.

The campaign: duration, markets, model years and operating system from MacRumors and Motor1. Both give 19 seconds; electrive says “roughly 20”. The English BMW statements are as quoted by electrive; the German ones were given to Der Spiegel and are cited via t-online and electrive, as is Durach's line about the last private retreat. Durach's English wording from December 2023 comes from BMWBLOG, quoting MediaPost. The seat heating prices are those bimmertoday reported in July 2022; they were not the same in every market.

Jobs and costs: dpa reported the 8,000 jobs on 29 July 2026; a BMW spokesman confirmed them, according to Börsen-Zeitung. The saving of around €1 billion a year from 2028 comes from press reports, not from a BMW document. Competitors: Mercedes sales via electrive, Cariad via electrive citing the Financial Times, BYD from KBA data via autohaus.de. I deliberately do not compare Mercedes and BMW margins. Mercedes reports an adjusted return on sales, BMW an unadjusted EBIT margin.

Text and research: Jonas Höttler. As of October 2026. The cover image and chapter images are concept images, AI-generated with Bria.