Inside BMW’s Next Generation Electric Vehicle and Battery Plant in Mexico

BMW’s electric future is taking shape on the outskirts of the Mexican city of San Luis Potosi, about 450 miles south of the US border.

At this five-year-old plant, BMW will produce a new generation of battery-powered cars with faster charging, longer range and more high-tech vehicles, dubbed “New class” or “New Class”. This will start in 2027. But preparations are already underway to expand the plant, add battery pack production, and begin producing new and critical models. I toured the huge facility and spoke with its President and CEO Harald Gotsche to get an idea of ​​how preparations for the Neue Klasse are going and what challenges lie ahead.

“Because it’s ours Gen6 battery production, this is the latest technology that we have. Lots of innovation. There are a lot of complexities,” Gotsche said. InsideEV. “That’s why we are already intensively preparing for this today.”

BMW plant in San Luis Potosi

Today, BMW’s San Luis Potosí plant produces approximately 450 2 Series Coupes, 3 Series Sedans and M2 Coupes per day for the US and global markets. It produces both plug-in hybrid and internal combustion models. In the meantime, production of Neue Klasse will begin in new plant in Debrecen, Hungary in late 2025 with a yet-to-be-announced SUV model. (This is also the model with which production of the Neue Klasse will begin in Mexico. BMWBlog reports.) Electric vehicles will also be produced in China for this market.

To move electric vehicle production to San Luis Potosí, BMW plans to expand its assembly and logistics area by approximately 100,000 square feet and its body shop (where the vehicle’s basic structure is made) by approximately 200,000 square feet. piece de resistance is a new 861,000 square foot building for the assembly of battery packs that will power Neue Klasse vehicles.

Now this structure is just a frame of steel beams. When it enters service, it will receive cylindrical cells developed by BMW from AESC, the battery company that construction of a new plant in South Carolina for supplies to several BMW plants. The plant will also later be supplied by Chinese battery company CATL, a BMW spokesman said. BMW says new cells will increase energy density by 20% and charging speed by 30%.

BMW already sells several electric vehicles, including the i7, i4, i5 and iX, in the US market. more success on this front than other legacy manufacturers. The Neue Klasse vehicles will introduce a new and improved EV-only platform that could play a key role in keeping BMW competitive in the rapidly evolving EV industry. This is especially important for Chinese marketwhere BMW and other European brands face stiff competition from new domestic rivals.

“99.99999% perfect”

One of the major production problems, explains Gotsche, relates to the new design of the Neue Klasse battery. Instead of making the battery from several smaller modules, as is the case in current electric cars, BMW will assemble hundreds of battery cells directly into a large package. By adjusting the number of elements in the block and their arrangement, BMW can produce blocks with different capacities and voltages.

This design helps save cost and space, and eliminates the manufacturing step. But it also complicates things and leaves little room for error. The stakes are especially high given that the battery is by far the most expensive component of an electric vehicle.

BMW cylindrical battery cells

According to Gotsche, each cell must be perfectly welded to the package. Just a few bad welds can render the entire package unusable if those spots can’t be corrected in a second pass.

“You have one chance to rework it at the second weld point. If it fails again, this 800-piece package will become scrap metal,” he said. That’s thousands of dollars down the drain.

For this reason, BMW is investing in innovative welding techniques and ways to identify problems on the assembly line. The company is also introducing “a whole new level of quality control” for element suppliers and its own processes, Gottsche said. One hundred bad parts per million (PPM), a quality standard for other components, won’t work for batteries, he said.

“If you look at the battery, it is very expensive. You have to go much lower than that,” Gotsche said. “You really have to use 99.99999% good parts. Otherwise you’ll end up paying for a lot of scrap metal.”

BMW plant in San Luis Potosi

Obviously, Gotsche wants to avoid confusion in the processes that monitored the production of General Motors’ new Ultium battery packs. for months on end.

To ensure everything runs as smoothly as possible by 2027, he has deployed around 70 engineers, technicians and logistics specialists to help get Neue Klasse production up and running in Hungary, as well as learning as much as possible about the new architecture and processes. Pre-production there has just begun, and Gotsche said the focus now is on fixing problems that “you won’t see after 50 cars, but maybe after 1,000.” Another 30 of his employees work in Parsdorf, Germany, at BMW’s battery research and development center.

By the second year of production of the Neue Klasse, the battery plant in San Luis Potosi will be able to produce about 140,000 battery packs annually in two shifts, according to a BMW spokesman. In terms of car production, the plan is to keep the single winding assembly line in San Luis Potosi, but add new sections for Neue Klasse cars.

Why Mexico?

Why hold Neue Klasse in Mexico at all? Following the supply chain chaos caused by the pandemic, BMW realized it needed to have a manufacturing presence wherever it sold cars, Gottsche said.

“Two years ago, we saw that during a global supply crisis, it is impossible to be completely dependent on global supply chains,” he said.

BMW plant in San Luis Potosi

Plus, the plant is large, new, and was originally intended to be a wide-open “innovation site.” This turned out to be an ideal location for a new, extensive battery assembly plant. The plant also operates with a focus on sustainability, so zero-emission vehicles are a good fit, Gottsche said. The company gets 13% of its energy from solar panels and plans to double that figure.

The solution was not only to use Tax incentives for electric vehicles in the USA who favor vehicles made in North America, he said. Perhaps this was a wise move, since US electric vehicle policy may change depends radically on who becomes president in January. Former President Donald Trump, for his part, said he would impose high tariffs on cars made in Mexico. Whether any of this will happen remains to be seen, but it is forcing BMW – and other manufacturers – to carefully plan their next steps.

“Frankly, we have to be careful because the total amount of this investment is 800 million euros,” Gotsche said, referring to the expansion of the plant related to electric vehicles. “And short-term policies make it difficult to depend on investment.”

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