BMW Regensburg plant opens additional body shop

BMW has opened an additional body shop for its factory in Regensburg. In the new production hall in Neutraubling, the manufacturer currently produces about 120 car bodies per day. This is because the plant's output is constantly increasing, with more than a third of electrified cars already rolling off the production line there in 2024.

The iX1 and iX2 as well as the corresponding two combustion models are currently being built in Regensburg. Last year, BMW converted a hall measuring around 40,000 square metres in Neutraubling for the additional new body shop. Around 150 employees currently work in the hall in single-shift operation. To the north of this site, four smaller extensions have also been built on an area of just under 1,000 square metres. With this new setting, the Regensburg plant now produces around 120 additional car bodies every day. As a result of this capacity expansion, bodies for the BMW X1 series will in future “no longer be produced solely in the existing body shop in Regensburg, but also in Neutraubling,” BMW wrote.

According to the company, the new body shop was built in less than twelve months. The production hall is actually located on a Preymesser site and BMW was already a tenant of the property. In April 2024, BMW then obtained a change of use so that the dismantling of the previous logistics facilities and the construction of the new body shop could go hand in hand. According to BMW, the first test bodies rolled off the production line in January and the ramp-up of production started at the beginning of March. A total of 294 robots are in use. “Once completed, the bodies from Neutraubling are transported to the vehicle plant in Regensburg, where they are assembled into finished cars around the clock in three-shift operation,” the car manufacturer explained.

The Regensburg plant is also preparing for the production of the Neue Klasse in parallel to the manufacture of current models. During the production interruption at the turn of the year, the plant carried out modifications in the Regensburg body shop (not in Neutraubling), in the paint shop and in vehicle assembly. Further ‘very extensive structural measures’ will follow during a five-week production interruption in the summer of 2025.

With an annual production of around 342,500 cars, Regensburg was the BMW Group’s highest-volume vehicle plant in Europe in 2024. It was therefore also more than 100,000 vehicles above its own annual production in 2023. As mentioned at the beginning, more than a third of the vehicles built in Regensburg in 2024 were electrified, i.e. either a plug-in hybrid or a fully electric model.

bmwgroup.com