Wednesday, BMW Group said it would put $1.7 billion into its US factories to make electric cars and batteries.
The investment will include $1 billion to convert the automaker’s current factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to make EVs. Additional $700 million are planned for a new high-voltage battery assembly facility in nearby Woodruff.
By 2030, the German car company plans to make at least six all-electric cars in the United States. BMW “X” SUVs and lithium-ion battery modules for the company’s two plug-in hybrid electric cars are now made at the Spartanburg plant. Later this year, BMW will start making its new hybrid-electric XM car.
BMW Chair Oliver Zipse said in a statement, “In the future, it will be a main driver of our plan to electrify, and we will build at least six fully electric BMW X cars here by 2030.”
Batteries from Japanese producer Envision AESC
On Wednesday, BMW also signed a contract with Japan’s Envision AESC to buy battery cells. Envision AESC plans to build a new battery cell plant in South Carolina to serve BMW factories.
BMW says that the Envision AESC facility would be able to make 30 gigawatt hours of batteries every year. This is similar to what other automakers and battery suppliers want to do in the U.S.
Envision AESC official stated new building will be expensive, but she wouldn’t tell how much. She said that the location of the facility would be made public by the end of the year.
In April, the company said that it was going to spend $2 billion to build a second facility in Kentucky. The first place that makes parts for Nissan Motor is in Tennessee. BMW is its second most important customer in the United States, and a spokesperson says talks are going on with “a number of global car manufacturers and partners.”
BMW announced a series of multibillion-dollar investments in EV production
The German carmaker plans to build four more battery cell facilities in Europe and China to fulfill demand.
The announcements are the latest in a series of multibillion-dollar investments in the production of electric vehicles (EVs) and batteries in the US. This is because pollution laws are getting stricter and laws are being passed to boost local manufacturing.
As part of the Inflation Reduction Act and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, automakers must also follow stricter rules about where their parts come from. Both proposals strengthened criteria for U.S.-made vehicle parts and suppliers to avoid tariffs or get financial incentives.
