Following its world premiere in the second half of May, the eighth-generation BMW 5 Series has now entered series production. The midsize luxury sedan is assembled in Dingolfing where workers put together all flavors of the G60: gasoline, diesel, plug-in hybrid, and purely electric. The larger 7 Series / i7 is also built there alongside the electric-only iX SUV.
The plant located in Lower Bavaria is the largest BMW factory in Europe and it built over 280,000 cars in 2022. The German luxury brand projects more than 300,000 units will roll off the assembly line as early as 2024 thanks to the launch of the new M5 Sedan and M5 Touring confirmed to take place next year. Codenamed G90 and G99, the high-performance models will use a plug-in hybrid V8 setup, but the future is inevitably purely electric. In 2024, BMW expects 40% of the cars that will leave the assembly line won’t have an internal combustion engine. Partially responsible for the jump in EV production will be the i5 Touring.
Dingolfing is also responsible for making one of the lesser-known BMW products, the 6 Series Gran Turismo. However, the large liftback carrying the internal codename G32 is going away as a replacement is not planned. We’ve checked BMW’s German website and the model can still be configured. The five-door oddity based on the same CLAR platform as the 5 Series is also made at the factory in Chennai, India. The smaller 3 Series Gran Turismo was discontinued in early 2020.
In 2023, BMW Group Plant Dingolfing is celebrating half a century of car manufacturing. In the 50 years that have passed, about 12 million vehicles have been assembled, with the 5 Series accounting for eight million examples or about two-thirds of total production. It all started in September 1973 with a tangerine-colored 520i (E12).
BMW spends more than one billion euros each year to pay the wages of over 18,000 employees and works with roughly 1,000 suppliers located in Lower Bavaria.
As a final note, we should mention the i5 isn’t the only new EV going into production this year. The iX2 will hit the assembly line near the end of 2023 at the factory in Regensburg where the mechanically related iX1 has been in production since last year.
Source: BMW
