The BMW Group has opened the Competence Center for E-Drive Production at its largest European manufacturing location in Dingolfing. Having produced electric powertrain components in Dingolfing since 2013, the BMW Group is now expanding its capacity significantly.

Production of the highly integrated BMW e-drive—final assembly

Bavarian Minister-President Markus Söder and Chairman of the Board of Management of BMW AG Oliver Zipse symbolically launched production of the new, highly integrated BMW e-drive, which combines the electric motor, transmission and power electronics in a central housing. The new generation of the BMW e-drive will be used for the first time in the new BMW iX3, which will go into production in China in late summer.

At the Competence Centre in Dingolfing, the BMW Group will produce electric powertrain components such as battery modules, high-voltage batteries and electric motors on eight production lines. Over the coming years, the company will set up four additional lines, which will boost the location’s production capacity significantly.

By 2022, in Dingolfing alone, we will be able to produce e-drives for more than half a million electrified vehicles per year. At the same time, we will produce a mix of fully-electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids and models with a combustion engine on a single line, as required by demand, so we can offer our customers the ‘Power of Choice’.

—Chairman of the Board of Management of BMW AG Oliver Zipse

In the next few years, the production area of the Competence Centre for E-Drive Production will be expanded to ten times the original size: from 8,000 square meters in 2015 to 80,000. The number of employees will also be increased. In the first half of 2020 alone, the workforce grew from 600 to 1,000. Up to 2,000 employees will work in production of e-drives at the Dingolfing location in the medium term.

One-quarter of BMW Group vehicles sold in Europe should have an electric drive train by 2021; one-third in 2025 and half in 2030. By 2023, the BMW Group will offer its customers no fewer than 25 electrified models—around half of them with a pure electric drive train.

Both the new, highly integrated e-drive and new high-voltage batteries were developed in-house in close cooperation between development departments and production. The company is pooling its expertise in large-scale standard production of electric drive trains at the Competence Center for E-Drive Production and thereby ensuring efficient production that can respond to demand for drive trains for fully and partially-electric vehicles at short notice.

The Competence Center has also standardized the technology used in production of battery modules for new fifth-generation high-voltage batteries, refining the process to reflect the growing range of electrified models and allowing different module variants to be produced on the same line.

The BMW Group has a highly flexible production network for electric drivetrains. The high-voltage batteries needed for electrified vehicles come from the company’s three battery factories in Dingolfing, Spartanburg (USA) and Shenyang (China). The BMW Group has also localized battery production in Thailand, where it is working with the Dräxlmaier Group. BMW Group Plants Dingolfing and Landshut produce electric motors. The Battery Cell Competence Center in Munich covers the entire battery cell value chain, from research and development to battery cell composition and design, all the way to large-scale manufacturability.