Nine Millionth Regensburg BMW: Velvet Orchid iX1 EV

The nine millionth vehicle built at BMW's Regensburg plant is an Individual-finished Velvet Orchid II Metallic iX1, a fully electric compact SUV destined for a Swedish customer.

BMW marks the milestone as the product of Regensburg's flexible assembly, where X1 and X2 family vehicles with mild-hybrid, plug-in hybrid and full-electric powertrains roll down the same line. BMW says the plant produced more than 150,000 electrified vehicles in 2025 and that a car leaves the line every 57 seconds, which works out to over 1,400 vehicles on a typical working day. Production runs around the clock in three shifts and in 2025 roughly 356,000 vehicles were shipped from Regensburg worldwide.

Factory operations and history

Regensburg began series production with the E30 3 Series in 1986 under an initial agreement to build 400 cars per day with some 3,500 employees. Today the Regensburg complex and the nearby Wackersdorf site together account for about 9,000 positions. Wackersdorf, roughly 50 kilometres north of Regensburg, handles cockpit production, material control and overseas supply, supplies Rolls-Royce doors and other hang-on parts, and conducts component testing, including high-voltage battery testing from early development stages.

The nine million-vehicle milestone highlights the plant's role in BMW's shift toward front-biased crossovers. Over the decades Regensburg has produced successive compact and midsize BMW generations, including the E30, E36, E46, E90 and F30 3 Series lines, plus the E92, E93 and F80 variants, three generations of the 1 Series, the E89 Z4, the F46 2 Series Gran Tourer and the F33 4 Series Convertible.

Through December 2025 Regensburg had built more than 4.17 million examples of the 3 Series, about 1.94 million 1 Series cars and 1.62 million X1 units. BMW now calls Regensburg its highest-volume factory in Europe.

As part of preparations for the Neue Klasse ramp-up BMW recently added an energy module preassembly operation at Regensburg. The company has confirmed that a Neue Klasse based model will be assembled at the plant later this decade, though it has not disclosed which model that will be.