German auto maker, BMW, marked a production landmark in the nearly 40-year history of the BMW Group’s Regensburg location, as the one-millionth BMW X1 rolled off the Regensburg assembly line late Wednesday morning.
The BMW X1 is BMW’s smallest Sports Activity Vehicle – and became the first fully-electric model produced at the BMW Group location in Regensburg in November 2022.
“The BMW iX1 is proof that we can build highly attractive electric vehicles for the premium compact class at our plant in Regensburg. This a very popular car with customers around the world,” says Plant Director Carsten Regent.
“To meet different market requirements worldwide, we rely as a company on technological diversity. Specifically, here in Regensburg, we have the flexibility to produce different types of drive train for the BMW X1 on a single production line – models with a combustion engine and plug-in hybrid systems, as well as with a pure electric drive train.”
In this year’s readers’ choice for the trade journal auto, motor und sport’s “Best Cars 2023”, the pure electric BMW iX1 xDrive30* from Regensburg came out on top, with 8.4 percent of votes. It won best-in-class in the compact SUV (Sports Utility Vehicle) segment, closely followed by the conventionally-powered variant of the compact Sports Activity Vehicle (8.3 percent), which is also built at the site.
From the end of this year, BMW Group Plant Regensburg will also produce a second BMW BEV, the fully-electric BMW iX2, in Upper Palatinate for the high-volume compact class. “Electromobility is a growth driver for our plant. We are currently operating at full capacity and hope this trend will continue,” says Regent.
A total of up to 1,000 units of the BMW 1 Series, BMW X1 and BMW X2 models are currently coming off the production line at Plant Regensburg every workday, destined for customers all over the world.
BMW Group Plant Regensburg recently became the automotive industry’s first plant worldwide to use an end-to-end digitalized and automated process for inspection, processing and marking of painted vehicle surfaces in standard production that relies on robots controlled by AI (artificial intelligence).