BMW kicks off construction work at the battery assembly plant in Straßkirchen

On Wednesday, the first excavators moved into gear on the construction site of BMW's new battery assembly plant in Straßkirchen, Germany. According to a German media report, the manufacturer submitted an application to the local district office for an early start of construction that was approved last week.

As the Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) reported, the first construction machinery has been delivered to the site. At the beginning of this week, the tape that had been used to mark the site since February was gathered up again – the tape was intended to prevent bird species that nest in meadows from building their nests on the future construction site. As the site manager told BR reporters on site, the first excavation work will begin on Wednesday. BMW has yet to announce the start of construction.

However, the BR writes that BMW’s application for an early start to construction work before Easter has been approved. That means that the excavators can now be used to remove the humus from the 60-hectare construction site to set up the building site and erect office containers, for example.

The procedure is quite common but has become more widely known since the construction of Tesla’s Giga Berlin. Tesla also carried out numerous construction works in Grünheide with provisional permits, even before the final approval and environmental review were available. Therefore, Tesla – and now BMW – acted at its own risk to reverse all measures. However, whether BMW will build as much as Tesla did with provisional permits is unclear.

In February 2023, BMW purchased the land in the municipalities of Irlbach and Straßkirchen in Lower Bavaria to build a large battery assembly plant on 105 hectares. The plant will be used to centrally assemble the supplied battery cells into ready-to-install battery packs and then deliver them to BMW’s Bavarian vehicle plants. The cells are likely to come primarily from Hungary, as BMW suppliers CATL and Eve Energy are building corresponding plants there.

BMW announced from the outset that only 60 of the 105 hectares would be built on for the time being. There was resistance from the local population, who feared the enormous impact of the plant traffic and wanted to prevent the loss of fertile land for an industrial plant. In a referendum in September 2023, however, the majority in Straßkirchen voted in favour of building the BMW plant.

br.de (in German)