BMW’s Car2Car Project Recycles Old Cars Into Fresh New Steel

BMW’s Car2Car research project has delivered a striking result, proving that a scrapped car can be reborn as high-grade steel for a brand new one. Working alongside a broad consortium of partners, the BMW Group has shown that closing the loop on car materials is achievable on an industrial scale, not merely inside a laboratory. It is a meaningful step towards a truly circular motor industry.

The headline figure is the so-called Car2Car rate. It measures how much of an end-of-life vehicle can be recovered at a quality high enough to flow back into new cars. Using today’s standard methods, that rate sat at just six percent. With smarter pre-sorting, modified shredding and sensor-based separation, it climbed to 51 percent. Metals led the way. Steel leapt from one to 81 percent, aluminium from 23 to 52, and copper from 48 to 68.

Steel tells the clearest story. For years, stray copper from cables and connectors has blocked old vehicle scrap from being reforged into fresh automotive-grade steel. The project cracked it with an extra sorting step that strips out the copper contamination. A patent has already been filed. The recovered steel was then rolled into coils and put straight to work.

This was no paper exercise. At BMW Group Plant Leipzig, more than 100,000 series parts were pressed from the reclaimed steel and fitted to vehicles. The trial drew on 433 cars spanning 60 different BMW models, some of them less than five years old. It stands as a rare example of a full industrial loop running from end to end.

Plastics and glass remain the tougher nut, and far more work is needed before they match the metals. The findings will feed into BMW’s Design for Circularity approach and shape its future models. With Europe’s incoming end-of-life vehicle rules on the horizon, the Car2Car project offers a clear map of what a genuinely circular car industry might one day look like.