BMW battery plant nears completion in Upstate SC

WOODRUFF — BMW will begin assembling battery packs for its new, South Carolina-built electric vehicles in December.

The German automaker has already hired and begun training more than 300 people at the battery assembly plant near the town of Woodruff, 15 miles from its vehicle plant in nearby Greer.

Those employees will work alongside 250 robots to put together the batteries for the all-electric iX5, which the company unveiled in June.

BMW, in 2022, announced its electric vehicle plans for its Upstate South Carolina plant.

It has since invested $1.7 billion into both the existing, 10 million-square-foot factory in Greer, as well as a new, 1-million-square-foot, battery assembly plant on 314 acres in Woodruff.

In exchange for that investment, the state offered up a $52 million grant to purchase the land in Woodruff and pay for offsite environmental improvements to offset the loss of acreage to development, as well as grade the property, which BMW officials said used to be home to a peach farm, to get it ready for construction.

The company also received income tax credits for each of the roughly 300 new jobs, according to the state Department of Commerce. Those credits are worth $1,500 for each new job.

At the same time, BMW announced it would partner with Envision Automotive Energy Supply Co. (AESC), a Japanese-headquartered company, to make the cells for the battery packs.

Last year, however, AESC pressed pause indefinitely on its $1.6 billion battery cell plant under construction near Florence.

Electric vehicle battery company halts construction of SC manufacturing plant

AESC representatives said then that the company “fully intends to meet our commitments to invest $1.6 billion and create 1,600 jobs in the coming years,” but did not indicate what the new timeline might be.

Neither the company nor Florence County economic development officials responded to messages from the SC Daily Gazette about an updated restart.

In the meantime, AESC is expected to ship battery cells made in its China facilities to the BMW battery plant in Woodruff, said Rich Everly, vice president of production at BMW Group Plant Woodruff.

Inside the Woodruff plant, employees are getting ready for the start of production by training on a virtual reality platform that mimics the assembly work they’ll be doing on the production line.

And on a sneak peak tour of the plant last month, reporters from the SC Daily Gazette and other news outlets got a glimpse of how the factory will operate.

At the start of the assembly line, thousands of cylindrical battery cells will be glued together in clusters, which will give the iX5 the capacity to drive 435 miles per charge.

From there, the cell clusters are transferred to the next set of stations, where they’re cleaned by lasers, welded by robots and inspected using camera and artificial intelligence systems.

“In Woodruff, we are combining cutting-edge processes, artificial intelligence and the expertise of our employees to create a production facility designed for the highest quality,” Raymond Wittman, a member of the Board of Management at BMW, said in a statement.

The clusters are then sealed inside a foam-filled battery pack, roughly the size of a queen mattress.

Some 50 trucks a day will enter and exit the Woodruff plant, Everly said, delivering supplies and sending finished battery packs to Greer to be installed in hybrid and all-electric vehicles.

The new iX5 will hit the market in early 2027, according to a June news release from the company.

The Greer vehicle plant, BMW’s largest in the world, produced more than 412,800 vehicles last year. Of those, around 200,000 were exported — a total value of $9 billion.

BMW has the capacity to make as many as 450,000 vehicles in Greer annually, Everly said, and updates to the plant allow it to shift seamlessly between gas, electric and hybrid vehicle production.

The Woodruff plant and Greer updates bring BMW’s total investment in South Carolina since 1992 to nearly $16 billion.