BMW opens a new battery plant in Bavaria: around €1 billion, built in two and a half years, for the new i3

BMW officially opened a new battery plant in Irlbach-Straßkirchen, Lower Bavaria, on October 1 and started series production there. The investment is around €1 billion, and just two and a half years passed between the start of construction and the opening. The plant assembles the sixth-generation (Gen6) high-voltage batteries used by BMW's new generation of electric cars, the Neue Klasse.

The first batteries go to BMW's Munich plant, where they're fitted to the new BMW i3. Because demand for Neue Klasse models is strong, BMW says it ramped up faster than planned and is running two shifts from day one.

Built in record time

Construction began in April 2024, and the first pre-series battery came off the line in March 2026, less than two years later. The project also passed a local test: in September 2023, more than 75% of Straßkirchen's residents voted in a referendum in favour of the plant, on a turnout of around 77%.

A few numbers from BMW's press release:

• a 60-hectare site with 50,000 m² of production space;
• 500 robots and two production lines;
• around 1,600 employees at full capacity, producing several hundred batteries a day.

According to German news agency dpa, as reported by n-tv, around 1,000 people work there today, most of them transferred from other nearby BMW plants where they built fifth-generation batteries.

"The new plant plays a key role in our production network: As the central platform, it will supply our German vehicle plants with sixth-generation high-voltage batteries," said Raymond Wittmann, BMW AG board member responsible for production. According to heise, the Dingolfing, Regensburg and Leipzig plants will follow Munich.

What's special about the Gen6 batteries

The batteries use cylindrical cells, bought from outside suppliers and integrated directly into the pack without intermediate modules (cell-to-pack). On top of that, the battery pack forms part of the body structure. More than 3,500 data points are tracked in real time for each battery, and every one goes through a full end-of-line inspection.

In the new i3, the result looks like this, according to BMW:

BMW i3 50 xDrive First Edition
Battery capacity	108.7 kWh
WLTP range	up to 906 km
Architecture	800 V
Peak DC charging	up to 400 kW
Range added in 10 minutes	up to 423 km
Bidirectional charging	yes

BMW also says that, compared with the Gen5 cell in the previous model, CO₂ emissions per watt-hour have fallen by about 33%. The cells use partly recycled cobalt, lithium and nickel. The plant uses no fossil fuels in normal operation and no water in battery assembly.

Five plants, one near Romania

Irlbach-Straßkirchen is one of five plants where BMW assembles Gen6 batteries, each located next to a car plant. The others are in Debrecen (Hungary), Shenyang (China), Woodruff (USA) and San Luis Potosí (Mexico). The Debrecen plant, close to the Romanian border, builds the batteries for the BMW iX3. We recently covered the iX3's success and the compact Neue Klasse EV BMW is preparing for 2028.

Sixteen kilometres from the new plant, in Salching, a cell recycling centre has been running since December 2025. There, materials are recovered mechanically, without energy-intensive chemical or thermal processes.

What it means for drivers

If you're waiting for the new i3, this is good news: battery production is running ahead of BMW's plan, which should help deliveries. More importantly in the long run, BMW is building its batteries close to its car plants, in Germany and Hungary, rather than shipping them from far away. The new i3's numbers, with up to 906 km WLTP and 423 km added in 10 minutes on a 400 kW charger, show that the sixth generation is a real step forward. On the motorway in winter the range will of course be lower, but for long trips, say from Romania to Germany, figures like these mean fewer and shorter stops.