BMW i3 Rolls Off the Munich Line and Straight Into A New Era

The first fully electric BMW i3 has rolled off the line at BMW Group Plant Munich, and the timing could hardly be better for the marque. As the second Neue Klasse model to reach series production, the i3 carries a heavy load of expectation. Order books opened in the middle of June, well ahead of launch, and demand has been strong enough to justify a notably steep ramp-up curve from the very first weeks of assembly.

Munich is no ordinary factory for this saloon. The plant has built the BMW 3 Series since 1975, with well over nine million cars leaving its gates in that time. Now the same site is turning that saloon expertise towards a battery electric future. From 2027, the plant will build fully electric vehicles and nothing else, making the i3 the model that opens a genuinely new chapter for the company’s home works.

Getting there took four years of rebuilding while the lines kept running at up to a thousand cars a day. Roughly a third of the site was reworked. A new body shop went up. A modern assembly hall arrived with logistics built into its structure rather than bolted on afterwards. A fresh delivery hall now handles the final handover checks before keys change hands. Doing all of that without stopping production is no small feat of engineering choreography.

The i3 also leans on a tightly woven network of sister plants. High-voltage batteries come from Irlbach-Straßkirchen in Lower Bavaria. Electric motors are built at Steyr in Austria. Motor housings arrive from Landshut. That vertical integration has helped trim manufacturing costs by a further ten per cent, a figure that matters enormously when electric saloons must fight established combustion rivals on showroom floors.

The numbers behind the metal look promising too. Provisional figures for the BMW i3 50 xDrive quote energy consumption of 16.1 to 13.4 kWh per 100 kilometres on the WLTP cycle, zero grams of CO2 at the tailpipe and a range spanning 758 to 912 kilometres. Board members have talked of a new era for the main plant, though the plant head made the sharper point. It is the people driving the change, not the machinery, who will keep Munich relevant.