BMWs and MINIs drive off production lines fully autonomously

Fully autonomous driving is becoming a reality, at least within the BMW and MINI factories. The cars drive themselves off the production lines after being finished without any human intervention. After a pilot in BMW’s largest European factory, Dingolfing proved successful, Leipzig is the official start of the roll-out. Other facilities are set to follow in stages.

Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I)

Since 2022, the company has been testing the so-called ‘Automated Driving In-Plant’ (AFW) for new vehicles at its plant in Dingolfing. Here the new vehicles drive fully autonomously – without a driver – along a route of more than one kilometer, from the two assembly halls, through the ‘short test course’, to the plant’s finishing area.

The systems rely on sensors installed along the route to allow vehicles to drive themselves regardless of their built-in options. According to BMW, this creates the largest LIDAR infrastructure in Europe and relies on an externally generated environment model and an external movement planner.

It’s actually an in-house application of ‘Vehicle-to-infrastructure’ (V2I), which refers to communication and interaction between vehicles and the surrounding infrastructure to improve transportation systems.

BMW worked for this with a young Swiss start-up, Embotech AG, which it had already ‘fostered’ in the ‘BMW Startup Garage’. That acts as a matchmaker between start-ups and BMW business units.

BMW i Ventures acts in this ‘Garage’, assisting start-ups in obtaining capital from investors, navigating complex legal and regulatory landscapes, and offering advice and support to help overcome obstacles.

According to the press release, BMW Plant Leipzig plans to introduce automated driving for around 90 percent of the BMW and MINI models built there, with Plants Regensburg and Oxford set to follow in 2025. The new site in Debrecen, Hungary, where the first pre-series of the Neue Klasse is being built, will also implement this technology from the official series production launch.

Forklifts on hydrogen

Regensburg is another example of BMW moving closer to the BMW iFactory, the company’s ideal digital and sustainable future factory.

BMW’s plant in Regensburg, in operation since 1986, where up to 1,400 vehicles of the BMW X1 and BMW X2 models come off the production line every workday, will deploy hydrogen-powered tugger trains and forklift trucks for all transport and logistics tasks from 2026.

This includes operations in the press shop, body shop, and assembly, ensuring that the necessary components and individual parts are delivered to the correct locations for installation. Filling stations will be installed in different production locations.

The measure is not only an ‘environmental’ issue, as the forklifts are already electric, but merely an efficiency intervention. The entire logistics fleet—some 30 tugger train haulers and forklift trucks—at the Regensburg plant currently uses batteries that must be changed twice per shift.

Battery replacement, performed manually using a crane, takes about 15 minutes and requires space. Filling up with hydrogen takes minutes. Between now and early 2026, Regensburg will install a two-kilometer-long pipeline network with six decentralized filling stations.