BMW has completed a major production overhaul at its Regensburg plant in Germany, installing new equipment that allows the site to join high-voltage batteries directly to vehicle bodies as part of the company's transition to its Neue Klasse electric vehicle platform. The work, carried out during a three-week shutdown from August 8 to August 30, involved several hundred structural and equipment upgrades across the facility.
The centrepiece of the investment is a new energy module pre-assembly area, which BMW refers to as the "Vormontage Energiemodule" (VEM). The key step, nicknamed the "Speicher-Hochzeit" or "battery marriage," sees the high-voltage battery secured to the vehicle body by robots at the beginning of final assembly. This differs from traditional automotive production, where the engine is typically joined to the body later in the process. Once the battery is attached, the vehicle returns to the regular assembly flow.
More than 1,000 employees from partner companies carried out the modifications while the X1 and X2 compact crossovers were temporarily absent from the assembly lines. Production of those two models has now resumed as planned. BMW has also built a high-bay warehouse capable of holding enough energy modules for an entire day's production, with batteries automatically transported to the assembly line via a conveyor bridge in the correct sequence and at precisely the right time.
The changes at Regensburg extend well beyond the new battery assembly area. BMW used the shutdown to carry out hundreds of modifications across the press shop, body shop, paint shop, vehicle assembly, and logistics operations. A key goal was to make every production system flexible enough to accommodate both existing models and Neue Klasse vehicles on the same lines. That flexibility will become increasingly important as BMW continues its transition toward a mixed lineup of combustion-engined, plug-in hybrid, and fully electric vehicles.
Regensburg already builds all three powertrain types on a single production line, with more than 1,400 X1s and X2s rolling off the assembly line each day. BMW has said production of Neue Klasse models will begin at Regensburg in the second half of this decade, with the next-generation iX1 expected to lead the way. The electric crossover, codenamed NB5, has already been spotted testing with its full production body and final lights.
The revamped iX1 is expected to move to a rear-wheel-drive platform, a significant departure from the current front-wheel-drive architecture. It will pair this new platform with cylindrical battery cells, which should deliver greater range than today's prismatic cells. The design is expected to resemble a smaller version of the iX3, inheriting the iDrive X central display and the pillar-to-pillar windshield projection. If series production gets underway as anticipated in late 2027, first deliveries could begin in early 2028.