BMW starts building new battery assembly plant in Strasskirchen

On Wednesday, BMW Group started the building works for the new battery assembly plant in Straßkirchen, Germany. According to a German media report, the manufacturer submitted an application to the local district office for an early start of construction. It was approved last week.

According to the Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), the first construction machinery has been delivered to the site. As the site manager told BR reporters on site, the first excavation work began on Wednesday. BMW has yet to announce the start of construction.

At the beginning of this week, the tape that had been used to mark the site since February was gathered up again. The tape was intended to prevent bird species that nest in meadows from building their nests on the future construction site.

Provisional permits

The early start procedure is quite common but has become more widely known since the construction of Tesla’s Giga Berlin. Tesla also carried out numerous construction works in Grünheide with provisional permits, even before the final approval and environmental review were available.

Therefore, Tesla (and now BMW) acted at its own risk by reversing all measures. However, it is unclear whether BMW will build as much as Tesla did with provisional permits. In February 2023, BMW purchased the land in the municipalities of Irlbach and Straßkirchen in Lower Bavaria to build a large battery assembly plant on 105 hectares.

The plant will be used to centrally assemble the supplied battery cells into ready-to-install battery packs and then deliver them to BMW’s Bavarian vehicle plants. The cells are likely to come primarily from Hungary, as BMW suppliers CATL and Eve Energy are building corresponding plants there.

BMW announced from the outset that only 60 of the 105 hectares would be built on for the time being. In the beginning, there was resistance from the local population, who feared the enormous impact of the plant traffic and wanted to prevent the loss of fertile land for an industrial plant.

However, in a referendum in September 2023, the majority in Straßkirchen voted in favor of building the BMW plant.