BMW Says One Million Cars Have Moved Driverless Inside Its Plants

BMW Group said on Oct. 27, 2026, that one million vehicles have now been moved driverless inside its plants, and that MINI Plant Oxford is the fourth of its sites to use the system. The cars travel with nobody aboard through marked production and logistics areas on company ground, not on public roads.

The company calls the technology Automated Driving In-Plant, and says it smooths the production process and brings efficiency gains in logistics. Rather than a worker getting into each finished car to move it to the next station or out to the yard, the car covers the route on its own.

BMW says more than 53,000 of those movements took place at Oxford in the past year, and that an average of around 3,500 are made every day across its production network. Those are the company's own counts of traffic inside its own buildings, with no outside measurement.

BMW's release says the sensors doing the work sit in the plant rather than in the cars: laser scanners along the route read the surroundings, and a cloud system and motion planning software steer each vehicle. That means nothing has to be fitted to the car, so any new vehicle can be moved, whatever equipment it was ordered with. The system carries CE certification, Europe's safety conformity mark, for use in production areas.

The pilot began at BMW's Dingolfing plant in 2022, and Leipzig and Regensburg followed. The company says Oxford is the first of its sites where the driverless cars are linked directly to existing control systems, which lets the system set a car down precisely beside a lifting device for a particular work step.

BMW Group Plant Spartanburg, in the United States, is next in line, from 2027. The technology was developed with the Swiss company Embotech.