BMW bets big on in-house battery brains

The story of BMW Group Plant Landshut begins, in true Bavarian style, with an acquisition. On 2 January 1967, BMW took over the medium-sized carmaker Hans Glas GmbH, based in the nearby town of Dingolfing, bringing with it a modest satellite site in Landshut. At the time, around 140 people worked there on vehicle components. Two years later, the local newspaper, the Landshuter Zeitung, ran a headline that doubled as a prophecy: "A present for Pentecost: BMW about to build cars in Landshut."

More than half a century on, Landshut is no longer modest. With approximately 3,700 employees, it is the BMW Group's largest component manufacturing facility in the world, and its fingerprints are on almost every vehicle the group makes - from BMW and MINI to Rolls-Royce and BMW Motorrad.

Every one of those vehicles carries something made here: whether that is a cylinder head cast in the foundry, a cockpit assembled in the plastics unit, or a carbon-fibre structural component shaped in one of the plant's specialist production areas. In 2023, the foundry alone produced around 3.6 million cast components.

But Landshut's identity has never been defined by volume alone. The plant has positioned itself deliberately as the group's centre of excellence for lightweight engineering and, increasingly, for electric mobility. 

Located adjacent to the plant, the Lightweight Construction and Technology Centre - known by its German acronym, ‘LuTZ’ - serves as an incubator for BMW's most advanced materials and processes before they transition to series production.

It is here that the plant developed the Injector Casting process, a patented and world-unique method that optimises the mechanical properties of cast components while reducing cycle times, energy consumption, and material waste. It is also from here that components for the BMW i models and the BMW iX were first brought to scale.

When AMS visited Plant Landshut in November just gone, series production of what may well be the most consequential thing the plant has ever made had been running for just three months. The Energy Master, BMW's central control unit for the Neue Klasse generation of electric vehicles, entered series production in August 2025, with a further expansion stage planned for mid-2026. By that point, the plant expects to have 700 people working on it. The iX3 Neue Klasse, built at BMW's new plant in Debrecen, Hungary, is the first vehicle to draw on it.

The logic of bringing it in-house

There is a moment in the life of any serious vehicle manufacturer when the logic of outsourcing quietly inverts. When a component becomes so strategically sensitive - so tightly bound to quality, cost, and competitive differentiation - that the usual estimations of make-or-buy tilt decisively toward internal production. For Landshut, that moment arrived with the Energy Master.

The Energy Master is not merely a control unit. Positioned on the roof of the high-voltage battery pack, it manages all essential functions relating to high- and low-voltage power supply and data communications for the electric drive - the interface between battery and vehicle, the arbiter of energy flow, and a critical node in the Neue Klasse's software-defined architecture. It is also, notably, the first time BMW has developed and manufactured such a critical electrical and electronic system entirely in-house.

Thomas Thym, who heads the site and whose career has spanned both production and global purchasing, frames the decision to bring this in-house in firmly commercial terms. "The decision is based on both - technological as well as commercial advantages," he says. The dynamic nature of product development during the pre-series phase, in particular, made in-house production not just attractive but rational. "Developing a new product like the Energy Master comes along with a very dynamic landscape of product changes during the development phase, which - from our experience - can be handled in a much faster and cost efficient way, when you do it in-house."

The strategic architecture is broader than a single component. Within BMW Group's iSupply Chain strategy, the Purchasing, Quality Management, and Component Production departments work in close coordination to ensure reliable parts supply to vehicle plants worldwide. By industrialising the Energy Master internally first, BMW can roll out production with an optimised process, strong quality assurance, and a short time-to-market before the method eventually transitions to the supplier base. 

Thym is explicit about where this positions the facility: "For Landshut, the entry into the Energy Master Production is a perfect addition to our already existing portfolio of technologies. Since one of our value contributions for our Division and the Group is to assess, and if necessary, support our suppliers, we are now in the position to do so also for E/E-Systems."

In other words, Landshut is not simply making a component; it is setting the North Star for the quality and methods every future supplier must meet. "BMW's own manufacturing expertise," as Thym puts it, "enables better assessment and empowerment of the global supplier market." The supply chain for the Energy Master spans some 30 suppliers across 10 countries; a sophisticated RiskHub, drawing on AI and big data analytics from publicly available sources, monitors that network for early signs of disruption.

But the deeper point is resilience by design: "By supporting suppliers with quality and supply bottlenecks," Thym explains, "in-house component production significantly contributes to the resilience of the supply chains."

From foundry floor to cleanroom: the human transformation

None of this transformation happens without people, and it is here that Landshut's story becomes genuinely instructive - and, at times, surprisingly personal. The plant invested €1.8 million (approximately $2.1 million) in training in a single year. Some of that investment shows up in headline statistics. Much of it shows up in individual stories.

Three colleagues who had spent their working lives producing interior structural components have, through a 12-month qualification programme, retrained as industrial electricians and now work as certified system operators in the Energy Master's highly automated production environment. One of them will travel to Debrecen to support the launch phase there. These are not marginal footnotes to a workforce strategy; they are its proof of concept.

The context matters. Across the automotive industry, the pressure to retrain and reassign workers as electrification and automation reshape production roles has become one of the defining management challenges of the decade.

At Landshut, the response has been to treat that challenge not as a cost to be managed but as an organisational investment to be made - one that extends, as Thym notes, well beyond individual programmes. "We plan our personnel restructuring strategically, with all the managers at the site working together."

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What made the transition work

Here in Bavaria, the approach begins well before any individual changes roles. Employees are involved early, and the goal is always to find a solution tailored to the individual. The plant maintains what it calls a qualification profile - a living record of the skills and competencies of every employee on site. The ambition is that nobody is blindsided by change, and nobody is left behind by it. The 12-month retraining programme is fully supported by BMW, including paid time off during school periods.

But the conditions that make such a programme land, Thym argues, go beyond process design. "Our employees trust us," he says, "and that's why they're very open to change."

That trust, once established, is a remarkable competitive asset. Reskilling at scale requires more than just institutional investment - it requires institutional credibility - the belief, on the part of employees, that the organisation transforming their roles genuinely intends to take them along for the journey. 

At Landshut, that credibility has been built over decades of the plant reinventing itself: from ICE component production to lightweight engineering, from lightweight engineering to electric drive systems, and now from electric drive systems to the software-defined battery control units that define the Neue Klasse era.

The question for the broader industry is whether that accumulated trust can be replicated in plants where the relationship between management and workforce is less settled, or the reinvention less gradual.

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When electronics meets production at scale

The Energy Master is produced in cleanroom conditions, monitored by AI-based camera systems, and assembled with the assistance of approximately 400 robots. Automation rates exceed 80 per cent. These are numbers more commonly associated with semiconductor fabrication than automotive component production, and the parallels are deliberate: Landshut drew heavily on electronics manufacturing logic when designing the line.

The transfer of ideas from tech to automotive has been partial, and Thym's account of what worked and what did not is refreshingly unvarnished. The AI-based vision systems, for example, proved genuinely transformative. "They allow us to detect deviations at the micron level," he notes, "something that was not standard in automotive production before." The high degree of automation similarly brings a level of repeatability and traceability - hallmarks of the semiconductor world - that maps well onto the reliability standards automotive demands.

But the translation has limits. "Where the lessons didn't translate one-to-one was in scalability and robustness under automotive cost and uptime pressures. Electronics lines are designed for relatively small, clean, and controlled product sets, while we deal with much larger and more complex assemblies, and production has to run with minimal downtime."

The solution Thym describes is less a borrowing than a synthesis. "The key takeaway is that we can't just copy the tech industry's playbook - we have to hybridise it. The most successful approach has been combining the precision and data discipline of electronics manufacturing with the robustness and process maturity of automotive."

Three months into series production at the time of AMS's visit, that fusion was still being refined. But the intellectual framework is unambiguous: neither industry's model suffices on its own, and the carmakers that will excel in electrified powertrain manufacturing will be those that can hold both in productive tension.

The light metal foundry and closing the loop on materials

Landshut has long been defined by its foundry operations, and it is in the foundry that the plant's sustainability ambitions are most visibly at work. By 2024, approximately two-thirds of the aluminium flowing through the plant's processes was sourced from secondary material - recycled rather than primary.

For a production facility that feeds large volumes of structural and powertrain components into BMW's global supply chain, that figure represents a meaningful reduction in the carbon intensity of the material base.

Sand recycling is another area of progress, though it is worth noting that some earlier figures attributed to the foundry require calibration. For the Neue Klasse housing production specifically, Landshut is targeting a sand recycling rate of 50 per cent in 2026 - an ambitious starting point for what the plant intends to build over time.

The more pressing question for the plant's sustainability trajectory is one of scale. The Neue Klasse programme will demand higher production volumes, which in turn means greater material throughput. Sourcing sufficient secondary aluminium to maintain, let alone improve, the current recycled content ratio as volumes grow is not a trivial challenge. "We expand our supplier portfolio to maintain a high secondary material quota even as volumes increase," Thym says. The logic is straightforward: the secondary material supply chain needs to be developed in parallel with production growth, not retrofitted to it.

Building an AI ecosystem for the industry

BMW's ambitions at Landshut extend well beyond its own factory gates, and the plant's investment in digitalisation has evolved into something closer to an industry-facing infrastructure. The facility hosts the Zero-Defect Supply Chain Campus, a structured programme through which BMW trains partner organisations in zero-defect production methods.

An adjacent AI Lab gives both BMW employees and external partners hands-on exposure to AI tools that are already operational within BMW's own processes. The goal, as Thym frames it, is, "to show suppliers what is already possible and where AI is actively used in our operations."

Two systems stand out as working examples rather than aspirational showcases. AIQX is a vision-based AI inspection system, deployed across all BMW Group plants worldwide, that demonstrates how machine learning can prevent incorrect assembly in real time. The AIconic Agent is a multi-agent system built for the Purchasing and Supplier Network division, designed to aggregate, analyse, and present complex procurement data in ways that make faster, more grounded decisions possible. Thym is deliberate about the distinction between demonstration and mere display: the point is not to show what AI might do, but what it already does.

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And we find that the underlying philosophy is one of deliberate openness. "This journey can only succeed if we take our partners in the supplier network with us - collaboratively, transparently, and with a shared vision," Thym says. The risk, of course, is that transparency has limits when competitive advantage is at stake. Thym's answer is less a bright line than a direction of travel: the entire objective is to demonstrate the possible, to empower the partner network, and to trust that a collectively more capable ecosystem ultimately serves BMW better than a proprietary knowledge moat.

Protecting what you've invented, sharing what you can

Not all of BMW's innovations are available for sharing, at least not unconditionally. The Injector Casting process, known as ICA, is a patented manufacturing method developed entirely in-house at Landshut. It is, by any measure, a genuinely world-unique process, and it has become critical to the production of Neue Klasse housings. Nothing quite like it exists elsewhere in the automotive industry.

And yet BMW has chosen to transfer the ICA process to selected partners, supporting them through the industrialisation of the method within their own facilities. The rationale is one of scale: if BMW's vehicles require ICA-produced components in significant volumes, it needs a network capable of producing them. "In general," Thym explains, "it is our target to transfer innovations, which arise from our own expertise and manufacturing capabilities, to our suppliers in order to scale them in all relevant regions."

In the case of ICA, that transfer has already happened - and it is a revealing illustration of how BMW thinks about proprietary manufacturing knowledge. The competitive advantage lies not in hoarding the method, but in mastering it first, proving it at scale, and then being the only organisation positioned to define the standards by which others adopt it.

The balance between proprietary protection and strategic sharing is something BMW also navigates through Catena-X, the automotive industry's emerging framework for secure, decentralised data exchange. "Data sovereignty and IP protection are not mutually exclusive with collaboration - they are foundational to it," Thym argues. Catena-X is designed so that each participant controls its own data, deciding what to share, with whom, and on what terms.

It is an architecture that allows BMW to accelerate innovation in partnership with others and, equally, to know precisely where the boundaries of that sharing lie - without requiring any party to surrender control of what they most value.

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The honest conversation about jobs in 2030

All of this - the automation, the AI, the reskilling - eventually arrives at the question that manufacturers in every region are most reluctant to answer directly. Landshut employs several thousand people and is, by any reasonable definition, the economic anchor of its corner of Lower Bavaria. The Energy Master facility, when fully staffed, will employ 700 people. But it will also run at over 80 per cent automation. What, precisely, does that mean for the relationship between BMW and the communities around it?

Thym does not dodge the question. "Transformation does change the nature of work - but it doesn't have to mean fewer opportunities. What we're seeing is not a reduction in people, but a shift in what people do. Advanced manufacturing creates new kinds of roles: more digital, more analytical, more focused on quality, process control, and system optimisation rather than repetitive manual tasks."

The commitment BMW is making, as Thym describes it, is not to maintain headcount at any cost, but to ensure that its workforce evolves alongside the technology. That means sustained investment in reskilling and lifelong learning, often delivered in partnership with local educational institutions and regional authorities.

It means treating the label of "employer of the region" not as a marketing claim but as a long-term obligation. "The good jobs of 2030 will look different," Thym acknowledges. "They will be more digital, more interdisciplinary, and more connected. But they will still be secure and meaningful."

There is an important distinction here between what is being promised and what can be guaranteed. The trajectory of automation in advanced manufacturing is not fully predictable, and the relationship between productivity gains and employment levels is contested in the academic literature. What BMW can control is the quality of its own transition - whether it treats reskilling as a serious investment or a box to be ticked, whether it involves employees and communities early or presents them with faits accomplis.

At Landshut, the evidence, so far, tilts toward the former. The three retrained system operators working the Energy Master line are, in their own way, the most compelling argument the plant can make. They did not lose their place in the industrial economy when their old roles became obsolete. They were given the tools to find a new one.

Whether that story scales to the broader transformation of automotive manufacturing - across thousands of plants, millions of workers, and a technological shift that is still accelerating - is the defining challenge of the decade. Landshut is not the definitive answer. But it may be the most instructive attempt at one currently running.