Executives are not the development team, and there's no word on whether actual EV engineers have defected as well. This really isn't surprising given the amount of poaching going on in the market these days between Tesla, Faraday, various VC-backed startups, and the upcoming China/emerging market players. Given the choice to get a better salary and actually work on a product millions of people might want instead of slogging away on a product line that BMW clearly doesn't care much about, these moves really aren't unexpected.
However in many cases they are the senior engineers of the development team. In this case the defection included executives who developed the i8 plug-in hybrid sports car and the electric powertrains for the i-series.
Not really. These big corporations have between 4-5 hierarchy levels. All people that are actually performing the engineering are on the lowest level - whether they are junior or senior engineers. And often even they are not aware of the details, because the actual engineering work is contracted. The next level are team leaders, which are only rarely involved in the development work. And the executives the article talks about are probably even 2 levels higher up. So maybe they lost some coordinators with a good vision, but not really the development team or technical knowledge.
This is true most of the time, but it might be that the electric car projects were handled as skunkworks. That's often the only way, for a very established incumbent, to protect substantial innovation attempts from corporate managers.
If that was the case, it's not unlikely that the management had genuine technical legitimacy. And that they're easy to poach, with a promise that their technical achievements won't be nullified by corporate politics.
(that's pure speculation, I have no insider info from BMW)
Even if the executives in question just spent their time dealing with coordinating efforts today, it's not unreasonable that they where doing real engineering 5 years ago when the development work was being done. The US might be different, but in Europe you generally don't become an executive in charge of a major engineering project without having earned your proverbial dues.
Disclaimer: I am located in Europe, working in the discussed industry and have spent the major time of my professional career at an automotive OEM (although not BMW).
I'm can totally acknowledge that most executives there have an engineering background (by degree) and started in an engineering position.
But for lots of them this point of their career is far behind them (>> 5 years), the field that they have actually worked on might not match their current position or that technology isn't even relevant any more. Executives that have worked as engineers in some mechanical field in the 90s and are now responsible for some cloud software or automated driving technology development (without any kind of SW knowledge) are not uncommon. It might make sense for the companies - but I also would not label these as the "development team" with the deep technical know-how.
Having worked my way a little up the engineer management chain, I have seen how easily one can lose the "pulse" of an engineering project if you are not day to day immersed in it. I would get a good sense of what the team was doing was on the right track or not but lose a lot of the details and context since I don't deal with it day by day. I had to rely on trusted reports to feed me the right data. I think if you move just one or two level up the management chain you lose all context of what is going on and are just parroting things back and forth. Kind of why I decided to step down a little.
Did they actually help design it? This wasn't clear from the article. I ask as often in large corporations the work of many individual contributors is associated to the management.
Iirc it's fairly common for car manufacturers to recruit executives from the engineering ranks. In fact I'd say it's fairly common in Germany in general to recruit what would be MBAs in other countries from the pool of people with engineering backgrounds (especially in mechanical engineering).
Especially in Europe, where companies are more likely to promote and train management from within rather than import freshly minted MBAs, compare to the US.
