The Ultimate Transformation Of How Cars Are Made

For greater than 100 years, BMW’s factories in Bavaria have turned out among the most iconic efficiency automobiles in historical past. For the following 100 years, the automaker is retooling all the things it does for efficiency of a unique type: batteries, electrical motors, and even robots to make them. 

At BMW, it’s a high-stakes and high-investment recreation that hangs on what it believes is the long run mixture of electrified and inside combustion autos that can preserve it worthwhile into the following century. 

Although BMW is among the smaller automotive producers—it isn’t Audi, which may lean on the large Volkswagen Group, for instance—the corporate’s focus and perception in electrification is exceptional. That’s doubly true in a political local weather that’s intent on backsliding into the times of pollutive petrochemical transportation. 

Final week in Munich, BMW revealed extra particulars concerning the battery cells, the so-called “Vitality Grasp,” and the motors that can underpin its upcoming Neue Klasse electrical autos. As BMW continues to trickle out details about the brand new platform and options, the corporate goes by a large transformation throughout its provide chains and manufacturing areas world wide. 

I went to Munich final week for BMW’s Tech Day and a behind-the-scenes take a look at how BMW is altering its oldest manufacturing strains to maintain up with EV demand. These initiatives embody maintaining with, growing, and testing new battery expertise and borrowing classes from the tech trade to construct new battery controller modules within the face of a slower-growth EV market. 

The brand new expertise will underpin future BMW autos, together with a brand new SUV and electrical 3 Sequence-sized sport sedan for the U.S. Whereas these will get produced and delivered first in Europe (beginning this summer time), we received’t see them stateside till someday in 2026 on the earliest. 

How BMW is Holding Up With Battery Tech

Ever for the reason that pandemic constrained provide chains, automakers across the globe have rethought how they convey electrical autos and their batteries to market. 

The shift represents a substantial funding from the trade. Within the U.S. alone, greater than $112 billion has been pumped into varied native electrification initiatives thanks largely to President Biden’s infrastructure legislation and the Inflation Discount Act (IRA).  

Firms like Mercedes, Toyota, Common Motors, and others have carved out services within the U.S., devoted to battery expertise analysis, with the intention of making batteries that can ultimately rely much less on heavy metals and non-renewable sources and to pursue future breakthroughs in solid-state expertise. BMW is not any completely different. It’s been capable of construct on the success and learnings from early electrical autos just like the i3 and the i8, each of which had been extensively accessible to prospects effectively earlier than different mainstream producers exterior of Tesla. 

In Parsdorf, Germany, about quarter-hour exterior of Munich, BMW constructed a 16,000+ sq. foot Cell Manufacturing Competence Middle (CMCC) the place it takes learnings from its Battery Cell Competence Middle (BCCC) and places them onto a pilot manufacturing line that may produce restricted runs of batteries just like the 4695 and 46120 spherical batteries that can underpin the upcoming Neue Klasse.

These upcoming batteries, developed by BMW, are made from a slurry utilized to a skinny copper sheeting, which is then rolled into cylinders, capped, and crammed with an electrolyte. The BCCC works carefully with lecturers world wide to create new battery expertise, and the CMCC scales and exams new battery expertise for future EVs. 

BMW additionally has a Cell Recycling Competence Middle (CRCC). This facility makes use of each hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy, together with different battery recycling strategies, to separate used batteries into their elemental components in order that they are often reused in future batteries. The intention to create a totally round battery manufacturing and recycling system that BMW can proceed to make use of effectively into the long run.

With all this funding in services, human expertise, and uncooked supplies, you’d suppose that BMW would possibly contemplate changing into a battery producer and supplying different industries with their battery expertise–or at the least in-house battery manufacturing, as is the case with the Coronary heart of Pleasure supercomputer that can underpin the Neue Klasse. However that’s not the case. 

The purpose of the three inside teams is to share any findings and electrification expertise that the corporate develops with distributors to see if they’ll meet BMW’s rigorous necessities and produce the battery expertise persistently and at scale. One of many spokespeople on the occasion in Parsdorf mentioned that the aerospace trade approached BMW about their battery expertise however that the corporate had turned down the chance. 

Within the U.S., BMW will roll out the battery expertise being developed and scaled in Germany at battery crops world wide–a course of that the corporate calls “local-for-local.” For instance, its brand-new battery plant, referred to as Plant Woodruff in South Carolina, is beneath building and progressing shortly. It represents a $700 million funding within the space close to BMW’s Plant Spartanburg, which builds and exports probably the most X3s on the earth.  

The funding additionally requires huge retraining of 1000’s of staff who construct BMWs everywhere in the world. To scale coaching with out disrupting the manufacturing line, BMW is leveraging plenty of applied sciences, together with gaming platforms, to make a seamless transition.

Over the vacations, Plant Spartanburg, proper subsequent door to still-under-construction Plant Woodruff, started to transition to constructing electrified X3s on the identical line because the ICE X3s. BMW leveraged video gaming platforms like Unreal Engine and VR to coach its manufacturing employees in the course of the brief break. Associates constructed a singular VR coaching program on Unreal Engine to present associates the chance to be taught the brand new processes for EV meeting. The expertise allowed BMW to maintain the manufacturing line up and transferring whereas making the transition. 

Retrofitting And Rebuilding Vegetation And Manufacturing For Neue Klasse

BMW’s plant within the coronary heart of Munich is greater than 100 years previous, and it’s at present within the means of being concurrently torn down and rebuilt to deal with extra electrical fashions on the three-story line. It represents a large funding of €650 million ($680 million) and a mind-melting logistics problem. 

The plant at present produces 1,000 autos a day, and regardless of the development happening everywhere in the 4.3 million sq. foot space, the road has not stopped. BMW at present builds each ICE autos and electrified autos on the identical line in Munich. 

The BMW plant in Landshut, about an hour northwest of Munich, can be present process important transformation. Landshut, which makes a speciality of light-weight powertrain supplies and building, is at present manufacturing the light-weight aluminum casings for the brand new asynchronous and electrically excited motors that BMW will use within the Neue Klasse. It’s additionally the place all the new “Vitality Grasp” controllers for the battery packs can be constructed for the world. 

BMW has leveraged classes and manufacturing strategies from the tech trade to make sure that all these Vitality Grasp management modules that roll off the road meet a excessive commonplace of high quality and reliability. For instance, the Vitality Grasp is inbuilt a clear room setting, primarily by robots, to make sure that no mud or particles will get into the controllers. The corporate is at present working with robotic arms made by KUKA, but additionally experimenting with smaller robots that may gently decide up, grasp, and plug-in wiring harnesses within the Vitality Grasp, a process that’s at present dealt with by people within the plant.  

As soon as the Vitality Masters are assembled and sealed, human specialists then overview the robotic’s work. Then the Vitality Masters can be shipped from Landshut world wide to be connected to the batteries constructed regionally for the Neue Klasse autos. 

In accordance with the corporate, the plant will begin manufacturing at scale in August. 

A Globally Versatile Manufacturing Line for EVs

The automotive manufacturing sector was rocked by provide challenges and chip shortages in the course of the pandemic, and plenty of, like BMW, have taken the teachings realized throughout these years and utilized them to create extra resilient native provide chains.

One of many largest challenges that the corporate sees to EVs and electrification is the rising regionalization (like President Trump’s proposed tariffs on overseas imports). To forestall important provide chain upheaval and minimize prices, the corporate has invested in each issues just like the battery expertise that can underpin the Neue Klasse and the manufacturing and meeting areas for his or her new EVs. 

“I believe that is one of many questions all people has in thoughts nowadays,” BMW board member Joachim Submit mentioned throughout a roundtable dialogue in Landshut. “The great factor is, we do not have to alter our technique.”

Submit mentioned that the corporate has a “technology-open strategy, and a worldwide footprint everywhere in the world.” It could possibly use all of that to tailor particular person choices to the wants of every market. 

“From the provision chain facet, we’re additionally creating local-for-local,” Submit mentioned. “Our philosophy is that manufacturing follows the markets, and the provision chain follows the manufacturing. We have now an enormous footprint within the U.S. We’re the most important exporter by worth from the U.S. and Germany, and generally individuals overlook these items.”

Despite EV headwinds right here within the U.S., due to the present administration’s present struggle on EVs and goals of rolling again Biden’s IRA and infrastructure work, BMW continues to remain the course. When requested concerning the influence that tariffs may need on the corporate, Submit was unfazed, stating that the corporate believes in the way forward for electrification and that it’ll proceed to offer buyer alternative. That features future BMW fashions, and their manufacturing strains will proceed to help all the things from full ICE to totally electrical autos. 

“It is a development market, and we’re collaborating very effectively because of the broad portfolio now we have in each, for us, related section, at the least one BEV,” Submit mentioned. “I believe that is a transparent benefit, and this goes hand in hand with our technology-open strategy as a result of markets and prospects determine which expertise they need.”

Abigail Bassett is an award-winning and skilled freelance journalist, author, on-air expertise and tv producer with greater than twenty years of various expertise. A winner of quite a few awards, together with two Emmys, her bylines have appeared in The Atlantic, Elle Journal, Nationwide Geographic, Journey & Leisure, Quick Firm, Inc., Fortune, The Verge, TechCrunch, CNN and extra.