Driverless in production.

At the BMW Group plant site, new vehicles drive automatically and driverless over one kilometre. The BMW Group is thus optimising its logistics and gathering experience for future autonomous driving.

The BMW Group is continuously digitalising and automating its production with the BMW iFACTORY. One of the pilot projects launched in 2022 at the BMW Group’s largest European plant in Dingolfing was for fully automated driving of new vehicles. Now, following CE certification for Level 4+ driving – the first of its kind – Dingolfing is in series production. Automated driving will start at the Leipzig plant in 2024. Other production sites such as the new plant in Debrecen, Hungary are planned to follow suit in 2025.

The new BMW 5 Series and BMW 7 Series vehicles already complete more than one kilometre without a driver at the Dingolfing plant. The fully automatic journey runs from the assembly area via the short test track to the finishing area. Unlike autonomous driving in road traffic, the vehicles do not guide themselves using their built-in sensors, but instead use sensors along the factory route. The largest LIDAR infrastructure in Europe was set up in Dingolfing specifically for this. The sensors localise the vehicles and detect obstacles. An external movement planner controls the vehicles’ automated movements, using state-of-the-art cloud architecture. “Automated Driving In-Plant optimises our production process and delivers significant efficiency gains for our logistics,” explains Milan Nedeljković, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG responsible for Production.

In future, the BMW Group plans to extend automated driving to other areas of the plant and to make use of vehicle technologies such as driver assistance systems for control in place of the sensors installed on site and external movement planners. The journeys could then be used as a test-bed for autonomous driving functions at level 4 and to optimise customer features. “Over the next ten years, we will log several million test kilometres with Automated Driving In-Plant in our production network alone,” says Nedeljković. “In this way, the BMW Group is once again setting a new benchmark for automation and digitalisation of its production processes – while paving the way for future applications in the field of autonomous driving.”