About a year ago, I visited BMW’s Munich plant to get a preview of the German automaker’s ambitious plans for solid-state batteries, the concept car behind the New Class electric reboot, and even color-changing cars. The Munich plant dates back to 1922. It has grown into a sprawling, high-tech facility that employs nearly 8,000 people from 50 different countries, has its own museum, and is an important part of BMW’s corporate history.
And that plant just built its last internal combustion engine.
BMW confirmed to InsideEVs that the company has now ended production of its V8 engine at the Munich plant, news first reported by Electrive and the BMW Blog. This marks the end of all internal combustion engine production at the company’s headquarters, and arguably its global beating heart. Granted, the plant still makes some cars that get ICE engines, but making actual gas engines there is a thing of the past.
Granted, BMW’s not done making traditional engines everywhere; it still makes a lot of gas engines, diesel engines, and hybrid powertrains elsewhere. But the symbolism here is pretty powerful. “The Munich plant no longer makes engines, but we do make ICE engines at other plants in Austria and the UK,” a BMW spokesperson told me. “This brings to an end 60 years of engines being built in Munich.”
To me, that says a lot about where BMW – and the world – is going next. And it’s not toward more combustion engines. At the Munich plant, BMW currently makes the extended four-door 3 Series and 4 Series family, a huge lineup of cars that includes the M3, 3 Series Touring, 3 Series Sedan and more. Along with those cars, it also makes the all-electric BMW i4, one of my favorite EVs on the market right now and something with a level of performance that deserves that M badge. (Other EVs such as the iX, i7 and i5 are built at BMW’s Dingolfing plant).
BMW is also notable as an automaker that’s taking a “mixed” approach to future powertrains, not unlike Toyota on a slightly smaller scale. It’s not taking internal combustion completely off the table like some rivals, it has a good lineup of hybrids, and it’s even keeping its fingers crossed on the hydrogen front. But all that shouldn’t hide the fact that BMW is actually doing some interesting things on the all-electric front, too. The new Neue Klasse platform cars should be excellent, it’s got more EVs coming in the meantime, and even Mini and Rolls-Royce have much more electrification in mind. What’s more, BMW has actually seen a lot of sales success with its EVs this year, while many rivals have struggled with uneven demand. BMW says that about 20% of its U.S. sales are now BEVs and PHEVs.
That’s commendable progress for a brand that has had to figure out what it means to make the Ultimate Driving Machine when you don’t have high-revving inline-six engines and manual transmissions to fall back on. But when even BMW’s historic home can see the end of the ICE era, I think it speaks volumes.
