The Munich carmaker BMW seems to be successfully defying the global crises, in March a surplus of 18.5 billion euros was announced for the past financial year. In order to be prepared for a future without combustion engines, the group is gradually converting its main plant in the north of Munich.
“The BMW Group is on course to achieve slight growth in 2023 as a whole,” said Sales Director Pieter Nota when presenting the figures for the first quarter. He sees fully electric vehicles and high-priced cars such as the 7 Series, X7 and the vehicles from the subsidiary Rolls-Royce as growth drivers. Although the group’s overall sales figures are stagnating, sales of electric cars are increasing: with almost 56,000 electric vehicles, BMW sold more than twice as many as in the same quarter of the previous year. The mid-size sedan i4, which has also been assembled at the main plant in Munich since autumn 2021, is particularly popular.
At the end of 2020, the group announced that no more combustion engines would be installed there in the future. The industrial site is to be successively converted into a modern production campus. To this end, the company is in regular consultation with the municipal department for urban planning and building regulations in order to develop a so-called master plan. This is expected to be presented to the Munich City Council in early 2024.
“Transformation” and “change” is what they call it in the upper floors at BMW. Down below, in the halls for engine and body construction, that means in concrete terms: moving out and demolishing. By the end of the year, engine construction will be completely relocated to Steyr, Austria, and the Hams Hall plant in England. “Parts of the engine construction building will be dismantled from the middle of the year,” says BMW spokesman Jochen Diernberger. In the coming years, a “highly modern and sustainable assembly and logistics building” would be built there.
The engine builders were retrained
Where there is no more screwing on engines, fewer engine builders are needed. V8 engines are currently still being produced in Munich, but most of the employees have been retrained and are now working in other areas of the company. After all, around 1700 employees have worked there in the past. BMW has always been proud of engine construction at the main plant, describing it as the “core competence of the BMW Group”. With the structural change in the automotive industry, the focus has shifted. “E-mobility is our priority,” said CEO Oliver Zipse at the BMW annual conference in March.
For the Munich plant, this means that the production routes there have to be rearranged during ongoing operations – “an enormous planning effort,” as company spokesman Diernberger says. The old paintwork is just being removed. A new body shop will be built on the freed-up space. From 2025 onwards, BMW intends to launch the first vehicles of the so-called “New Class” – its own future vision of individual mobility. They should also roll off the assembly line in Munich.