BMW is a German car company, but its largest markets are overseas—that is, overseas from Germany. The largest market for BMW is China, while the second-largest consumer of BMW vehicles is the United States, so BMW ships huge numbers of cars to China and to the U.S. But at the same time, BMW builds a huge number of cars here for direct sale to American buyers—as well as for export.
It’s that part about making BMWs in the U.S. that is very interesting, because not only does BMW’s single U.S. plant in South Carolina make every X3, X4, X5, and X6 sold in the United States, it also makes every one of those vehicles sold in China—or anywhere else in the world, for that matter.
BMW Plant Spartanburg is the company’s largest factory by production volume. It is also the single largest U.S. exporter of cars by dollar value. In 2015, BMW’s South Carolina factory manufactured 400,904 vehicles, and shipped about $10,000,000,000 worth of them overseas—including to China.
We’ll talk about one for China in a minute but first, let’s recap what BMW Plant Spartanburg has accomplished.
The first BMW manufactured in the United States came off the Spartanburg assembly line on September 8, 1994. It was a BMW 318i.
It took almost twelve more years before Spartanburg became a millionaire, hitting 1,000,000 vehicles produced on February 28, 2006. These included some 3 Series, the Z3 Roadster and Z3 Coupe, and the X5. The second millionth BMW built by the plant came a lot quicker, on June 12, 2012, in six years—half the time it took for the first million.
Just over three years later, on March 24, 2015, BMW Plant Spartanburg built its 3,000,000th vehicle, cutting the time to make a million in half again, to only three years.
Getting back to the present day, the 3,500,000th BMW just came off the line last month, making it only fourteen months to build a half-million vehicles.
The 3.5 millionth Spartanburg BMW was a Mineral White 2016 BMW X4 xDrive20i with a Mocha Nevada Interior. As soon as it came off the line it headed for the Port of Charleston en route to its new owner in Fuyang, China, which is about seven hours west of Shanghai, for those of you keeping track.
Plant production will be bumped up again next year with completion of its latest $1,000,000,000 expansion. Then comes the startup of the BMW X7 production line, sometime in 2017 or 2018. BMW hasn’t called us with those details yet.—Scott Blazey
[Photos courtesy of BMW AG.]
