BMW, Mercedes launch biggest EV push yet to catch Tesla with new models
BMW took the wraps of the Vision Neue Klasse electric vehicle at the IAA motor show in Munich, Germany. It underpins BMW’s big push into electric vehicles.
BMW
MUNICH, Germany — BMW and Mercedes are making their biggest push yet into electric cars in a bid to fend off rising competition from Chinese players and catch up with U.S. giant Tesla.
In the last few days, as part of the IAA Mobility motor show in Munich, Germany, the auto giants took the wraps off electric concept cars and new platforms for their future battery-powered vehicles.
European carmakers, which have been perceived to be behind Chinese companies like Warren Buffett-backed BYD and Elon Musk’s Tesla, have had to move quickly to show the market they’re ready to be major players in the electric era.
On Sunday, Mercedes-Benz unveiled its Concept CLA Class, an electric vehicle built on a new architecture that will underpin future battery cars from the German auto giant. The company said the concept car has a range of 750 kilometers (466 miles) as well as an ability to reach a range of 400 kilometers with just 15 minutes of charging.
Mercedes CEO Ola Kallenius talked up the car, calling it a “revolutionary development” for the German firm.
“With those efficiency numbers, that kind of range, that kind of fast charging, I am not aware of any vehicle, in that class that can match that,” Kallenius told CNBC’s Annette Weisbach on Sunday.
On Saturday, rival BMW showed off the “Vision Neue Klasse,” another electric concept car that highlights the company’s EV ambitions. Neue Klasse is BMW’s new architecture for its EVs. The first vehicles based on this platform are set to enter production in 2025.
“In only two years’ time, these cars will hit the road and with that, overall, we lead BMW to a new era of innovation and sustainability. That’s the purpose of our show here at the IAA,” BMW CEO Oliver Zipse told CNBC’s Arabile Gumede.
Zipse said BMW is going to double its EV sales this year. By the end of 2023, 15% of BMW’s global sales will be battery EVs, he added.
Mercedes and BMW’s dedicated EV platforms are a departure from previous architecture where they would adapt combustion engine or hybrid models and add batteries. This is the companies’ biggest push yet toward a new platform for the electric vehicle era.
Analysts said that Mercedes and BMW’s announcements are big steps but might leave them still lagging behind Tesla.
“The new platforms at Mercedes and BMW showcase, for the first time, what the European OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] will be capable of. These cars are likely still a year away, but their specifications show that European OEMs will be able to create compelling products,” Daniel Roeska, senior research analyst at Bernstein Research, told CNBC via email.
Roeska said that these new platforms “will close a large portion of the gap” to Tesla and the Chinese players, “but not all the way.”
Price war in focus
BMW and Mercedes are wading further into an increasingly competitive electric vehicle market, broadly dominated by Tesla and various Chinese players.
Tesla commanded 20% of the global EV market in the second quarter, followed by 15% for BYD, according to Counterpoint Research.
And the competition has become more fierce thanks to a price war largely sparked by Tesla. The U.S. automaker began cutting prices in 2023, vowing to sacrifice margins in the short term for market share gain.
Mercedes and BMW both play in the premium segment of the market, where cars like Tesla’s Model S and Model X compete. As they prepare to release more EVs in the coming years, Mercedes maintains its focus is not on pushing large volumes.
“We are not pushing volume, we are focusing on value over volume,” Kallenius said.
Meanwhile, Volkswagen’s strategy appears to be to release cars at various prices to capture different segments of the market.
The company announced Sunday that it will launch eleven new all-electric models by 2027, underscoring its EV push. In 2026, Volkswagen said it plans to launch the ID. 2all, an electric vehicle that will sell for less than 25,000 euros ($26,942).
The German auto giant showed off the ID. GTI Concept electric vehicle at the IAA show, and said a production version of the car is scheduled to hit the road in 2027.
Tesla, China dominate with tech in focus
In a world where batteries are powering cars, it’s not just design of the car or the engine that is going to win over consumers. Technology is increasingly important.
“Premium EVs now need to resemble smartphones more than traditional cars to offer a similar experience to Tesla – the gold standard in EVs with its vertically integrated platform,” Counterpoint said in a note last week.
Indeed, Tesla has built its business on controlling the hardware – the car itself – as well as the software that goes inside it. Musk often talks up the company’s Autopilot features which allow the car to carry out some driving features autonomously. Tesla’s large internal screen and apps make it feel more akin to using a smartphone.
Many of the Chinese automakers including upstarts Xpeng and Nio also market their semi-autonomous driving features.
At the IAA conference, incumbents have also been talking up their tech prowess in a bid to show they too can match Tesla and the Chinese start-ups.
For example, BMW said its Vision Neue Klasse EV has a heads-up display that projects information on the driver’s windscreen.
BMW CEO Zipse said that the Vision Neue Klass represents the “largest investment” in a car on the “digital side,” which includes semiconductors.
“This is a completely digital feeling to the car,” Zipse said.
Partiful’s CEO, Shreya Murthy, and CTO, Joy Tao
Courtesy: Partiful
When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao decided to launch a party-planning startup in 2020, they settled on a business goal of “bringing people together in person.”
The Covid-19 pandemic demanded the exact opposite.
Despite the challenge of the pandemic, Partiful survived, and five years later, the New York startup is now used by millions of people to plan events such as birthday parties, housewarmings and weddings.
The app’s a favorite of those ages 20 to 30, and it’s added 2 million new users since January, Partiful CEO Murthy told CNBC. The company has never revealed its exact base of monthly users.
Partiful drew attention on social media after Apple, known for replicating features from popular apps on the iPhone, launched its own event-planning service in February, and the startup posted a joke about “copycats” on its X account.
Of course, Partiful isn’t the first party-planning app. It competes against not only Apple Invites, but also Eventbrite, Evite, Punchbowl and others.
Each service differs slightly in its target markets and features. Evite, for example, uses a “freemium” model, where certain invitation designs and other features are paywalled. Eventbrite is often used to promote and sell admission to large public events.
What sets Partiful apart from its competitors — and appeals to its Gen Z user base — is its often humorous, casual designs, some of which are created by Partiful’s in-house designers.
“Friend invited me to a gathering that doesn’t have a Partiful….feeling lost, confused, unprepared…much like when I (Gen Z) receive a phone call out of the blue,” X user Athena Kan posted in August.
For the first quarter of 2025, Partiful averaged 500,000 monthly active users, up 400% year over year, with 9 out of 10 users on the app based in the U.S., according to estimates provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, a market research firm. That compares with Eventbrite’s 4.4 million monthly active users, which is up 2% year over year, and Punchbowl with approximately 85,000 monthly users, which is down about 2% compared to a year ago. A spokesperson for Evite told CNBC that the service saw more than 20 million monthly active users for the first quarter of 2025.
It’s unclear how many people still use Facebook’s once-popular event-planning feature Facebook Events. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, shut down the standalone app.
Sample invitations from the Partiful app
Source: Partiful
Bringing people together in real life
Murthy and Tao both went to Princeton University and worked at Palantir Technologies at the same time, but they didn’t meet until they were introduced later by a mutual friend. Both were looking to move to the consumer-facing side of tech.
Tao, then a software engineer at Meta, wanted to leave the company to focus on products that were more relatable to daily life, and said that the social media company’s goal of keeping users engaged on their apps sometimes can create “perverse incentives.”
“For me, driving more people to spend more time staring at their phone, staring at this endless feed of content, wasn’t super motivating, wasn’t super meaningful to me personally,” said Tao, Partiful’s tech chief and a self-described “avid party planner.”
Meta declined to comment.
Tao and Murthy went through a sort of “dating period” where they asked each other what they thought leading a startup together could look like. Among the voids they identified was how intimate social events, such as birthday parties where a host would be likely to see the attendees again, were still planned on text chains that made it difficult to track, communicate or plan an ideal event time with guests.
“If you’re not sure when people are free, that’s a really annoying problem,” Murthy said.
She and Tao took the leap.
With few in-person events happening during the 2020 lockdowns, Partiful’s engineering team focused on building the platform’s text message-based infrastructure so that the service could be used by both iPhone and Android users.
Partiful’s team, which has now grown to 25, operates out of downtown Brooklyn. The service is no longer limited to text messages and its website. The company launched apps for the iPhone and Android devices in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and Partiful now serves as a one-stop destination for organizing the different phases of planning and hosting a party. The company has reportedly raised $20 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Speaking Gen Z’s language
What makes Partiful fun for users is how customizable an invite can be.
Hosts can create a free birthday invite with a lime-green parody cover of Charli XCX’s “brat” album, for example, or plan a girls’ night out with a cover photo of Shrek in sunglasses. They can track “yes,” “no” or “maybe” RSVPs under a portrait of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, and invited guests can use a “boop” feature to send random emojis rather than a direct message to each other.
Party planners can also send out uniform text blasts to the group before and after the event and manage an in-app photo album for uploading memories.
Partiful is available for anyone to use, but Murthy said the company sees the most need for the service among young users in the “postgrad” period of life. That’s a stage where people might be moving to new cities and away from their established college friend groups.
“You’re starting your adult life and have to not only figure out, ‘How do I rent an apartment? How do I work a new job? How do I exist in this new version of myself?'” Murthy said. “On top of that, you’re also having to rebuild your entire social circle.”
For the hosts and partiers in its user base, Partiful has become part of their social routine, and it has continued to gain traction online. The company told CNBC that over 60% of its active app users check Partiful every week.
As for Apple, Partiful isn’t sweating its new rival just yet.
Apple Invites requires that users have an iCloud+ subscription to create events, though it’s free to RSVP if a guest doesn’t have an Apple account. That service starts at 99 cents a month in the United States. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Partiful is free, at least for now.
Like many other tech companies that rely on distribution services such as Apple’s App Store, Partiful has a nuanced relationship with its much-larger counterpart. Partiful could lose some users to Apple, but it can also benefit from promotion by the app distributor.
That’s what happened in 2024, when Partiful was named a finalist for Apple’s App Store Awards for Cultural Impact, and won Google Play’s “Best App of 2024.” The app remained an “editor’s choice” pick on the App Store as of publication.
For now, Partiful remains confident.
“We haven’t really seen any users that have been leaving Partiful for Apple Invites,” Murthy said.
WATCH: Why iPhones may get more expensive amid Trump tariffs
An attendee wearing a Super Mario costume uses a Nintendo Switch 2 game console while playing a video game during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the ExCeL London international exhibition and convention centre in London, Britain, April 11, 2025.
Isabel Infantes | Reuters
Nintendo on Friday announced that retail preorder for its Nintendo Switch 2 gaming system will begin on April 24 starting at $449.99.
Preorders for the hotly anticipated console were initially slated for April 9, but Nintendo delayed the date to assess the impact of the far-reaching, aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs that President Donald Trump announced earlier this month.
Most electronics companies, including Nintendo, manufacture their products in Asia. Nintendo’s Switch 1 consoles were made in China and Vietnam, Reuters reported in 2019. Trump has imposed a 145% tariff rate on China and a 10% rate on Vietnam. The latter is down from 46%, after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations.
Nintendo said Friday that the Switch 2 will cost $449.99 in the U.S., which is the same price the company first announced on April 2.
“We apologize for the retail pre-order delay, and hope this reduces some of the uncertainty our consumers may be experiencing,” Nintendo said in a statement. “We thank our customers for their patience, and we share their excitement to experience Nintendo Switch 2 starting June 5, 2025.”
The Nintendo Switch 2 and “Mario Kart World“ bundle will cost $499.99, the digital version “Mario Kart World” will cost $79.99 and the digital version of “Donkey Kong Bananza” will cost $69.99, Nintendo said. All of those prices remain unchanged from the company’s initial announcement.
However, accessories for the Nintendo Switch 2 will “experience price adjustments,” the company said, and other future changes in costs are possible for “any Nintendo product.”
It will cost gamers $10 more to by the dock set, $1 more to buy the controller strap and $5 more to buy most other accessories, for instance.
WATCH: Nintendo has ‘a lot of work to do’ to convince casual users to upgrade to Switch 2: Kantan Games
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