A BMW i3 drawing. (credit: BMW)

Late last week, Reuters reported that several top executives from BMW would be skipping the Paris Motor Show to figure out how the company will proceed in its electric car strategy.

Anonymous sources said the company is weighing whether it will change course on its electric i3 program, which only saw 25,000 deliveries last year. Some executives want the company to produce an electric Mini that would hit markets as soon as 2019—but that’s likely an expensive endeavor since the company would have to alter the Mini platform to house a giant battery and upgrade its factories to accommodate that production. One anonymous source told Reuters it would be more expensive to retool the i3 platform for a Mini body than to re-engineer the Mini platform to support the kind of battery it would need to be all-electric.

Still, government regulation in the US and Europe is increasingly favoring low- and zero-emissions vehicles, and the popularity of Tesla’s Model 3—which received hundreds of thousands of reservations in the week after it was announced—are encouraging companies to invest in electric vehicles.