The epic facts and figures of BMW’s biggest factory Car News

And then you get the most notable ones – the BMW plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina being one of those places.

We recently visited Spartanburg as part of M-division’s 50th anniversary celebrations in the USA. It’s where the majority of the brand’s X models are built, from the BMW X3 to the BMW X7, so it’s not particularly ‘M’ in spiritual terms, but it’s the biggest manufacturing site of BMW and the scale of the operation is something else. Here is the bottom.

More than 11,000 people working at the 7,000,000 square foot site help produce approximately 1,500 cars per day, of which approximately 65% ​​is exported to approximately 120 countries.

Naturally, more and more of these cars are becoming electrified (first there are the BMW X3 xDrive30e and BMW X5 xDrive 45e), although any adaptation of the facility to build pure electric vehicles and whip around 600kg of batteries , all under the constraint of a takt time of 90 seconds , is still on the drawing board.

From November, the new 740hp BMW XM plug-in hybrid über-SUV – the “new rockstar”, as company executives put it – will also be built in Spartanburg, cementing Spartanburg as the most zeitgeisty of them all. current BMW factories.

Cars aside, it’s the supply and export chains that set Spartanburg apart. BMW moved to the region in the early 1990s, when the long-established textile industry was outsourced to China. This meant that a skilled workforce was close at hand, although the region’s unique infrastructure was just as important.

Greenville Airport is a 15 minute drive away and wasn’t an international affair until BMW moved in and had the runway expanded to accommodate Boeing 747s carrying parts.

A plane (maybe two) from Frankfurt still lands every day, although airfreight is so expensive that the parts it carries are now VIP or emergency parts, such as semiconductor chips (for an illustration of the chaos that now engulfs car manufacturing). , consider that any decision to increase the supply of semiconductor chips must be made fully two years in advance).