The first series-produced BMW i4 has rolled off the Munich facility of the legendary carmaker which is now almost 100 years old. BMW now makes all drive variants on a single assembly line which is a huge manufacturing milestone for BMW as it transforms itself towards becoming a major electric car company.
"For the plant and team, the launch of the BMW i4 is a milestone on the road to electric mobility By 2023 more than half of all vehicles from our Munich facility will have an electrified drive. The majority will be fully electric. So Munich goes fully electric," said Milan Nedeljković, BMW AG Board Member for Production.
BMW also makes the hybrid BMW 3 series sedan and touring editions along with the BMW M3 and 4 Series Gran Coupe. 90 percent of the existing systems in the Munich body shop can be still used for EVs and the new model but additional machines, techniques were added to integrate the assembly of the high voltage battery. The integration needed an investment of $233 million.
The BMW i4 M50 is significantly quicker to triple-digit speeds at 3.9 seconds.
BMW has digitised the plants and added 3D scans to obtain a full set of basic digital data. By the end of 2022, the structure of all major plants in the BMW production group will have been scanned with digital data available for everyone.
BMW is also laying down a marker for sustainability - it has announced a reverse osmosis system to cut down its water consumption by 6 million liters. It also has a new target at hand which is for local emissions from the transport logistics at the plant in Munich to gradually fall to zero over the next few years.
It has also announced that it will be relocating the four-cylinder engine production to Hams Hall, UK, and Steyr, Austria by the end of the year. The engine production as a whole will shift from Munich by 2024.
