BMW’s factories have driven a million new cars with no one inside

BMW Group’s factories have now moved one million newly built cars with nobody inside them. In four plants in Germany and the UK, a car that has just come off the assembly line drives through the plant’s production and logistics areas on its own, steered by software from the Swiss company Embotech. The car itself sees nothing on that trip. The building does the seeing.

That is the part that matters to anyone who has wondered when cars will drive themselves. The cars that make these trips are ordinary BMWs and MINIs, with no extra cameras and no special autonomy package. Lidar sensors mounted around the factory track every car, offboard servers plan its path, and the plan reaches the car through the drive-by-wire controls it already has for steering and braking. In most car plants, a human driver still has to climb into each new car and drive it away to be parked or loaded onto a truck.

The pace is the striking number. BMW and Embotech say the system now handles about 3,500 car movements a day, roughly one every 25 seconds around the clock, and stays available more than 99.5% of the time. According to Embotech’s chief executive, Andreas Kyrtatos, the first 500,000 automated trips took 15 months. The next 500,000 took seven.

Eva Beck, Embotech’s chief commercial officer, told The Robot Report that the perception “is in the infrastructure” and that vehicles “don’t need self-driving capabilities or extra sensors.” The lidar comes from the Chinese maker Hesai, and Embotech’s servers recalculate each car’s trajectory ten times per second. A separate safety layer, certified by the German testing body TÜV SÜD, sets the limits the planning software cannot cross, and the cars share the floor with factory workers and with vehicles that people still drive by hand.

BMW’s own description of the first route shows how ordinary the job is. At Dingolfing, its largest European plant, new cars leave the two assembly halls, run through a short test course and reach the finishing area, a trip of more than a kilometer. BMW has called the sensor network along that route the largest lidar installation in Europe.

The limits are tight. The system works only inside mapped, fenced areas of a plant that has been wired with sensors for it, and a car that leaves the gate has none of that help. The figures come from the two companies and have not been checked by anyone outside them. Neither BMW nor Embotech has said what the lidar network costs per plant, or what has happened to the drivers who used to make these trips. Embotech also admits that most of the industry is still running pilots with a handful of vehicles, which makes BMW’s scale the exception rather than a sign that every factory works this way.

Embotech, a spin-off of the Swiss university ETH Zurich founded in 2013, describes itself as the first company with more than one TÜV-certified Level 4 driving system, a claim it makes about its own products. Besides car plants, it sells the same platform to vehicle distribution centers, ports and logistics yards, including a version that drives tractor units.

The project started in 2022 as a pilot at Dingolfing with the BMW 7 Series and the electric i7, developed with Embotech and the South Korean company Seoul Robotics. It moved into series production at Dingolfing and Leipzig in 2024 and has since reached Regensburg and the MINI plant in Oxford. Raymond Wittmann, the BMW board member in charge of production, said the company is “now rolling out this technology worldwide.” Beck said Embotech is looking to roll the system out next year at BMW’s plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Spartanburg is also the plant where BMW has tested humanoid robots from Figure AI. The robots that get the attention walk on two legs. The one that has quietly moved a million cars is a building full of lidar.

Tags: Meghan Markle, robotics, BMW, Embotech, factory automation, Figure AI