BMW Opens Woodruff Battery Plant for iX5

BMW officially opened Plant Woodruff in South Carolina on Friday, November 13, and started series production of high-voltage batteries on the same day. The plant assembles sixth-generation, or Gen6, battery packs for electric vehicles built 15 miles away at Plant Spartanburg. Its first customer is the BMW iX5, the first fully electric BMW assembled in the United States.

The plant is a $700 million investment covering one million square feet. It houses a production line, a quality testing hub and a virtual reality training center. More than 300 employees work at Woodruff, alongside 250 robots that assemble the packs. The site is BMW's first high-voltage battery assembly plant in North America, and the fourth in its Gen6 network to start series production, after Debrecen in Hungary, Irlbach-Straßkirchen in Germany and Shenyang in China.

Woodruff completes a $1.7 billion program that also expanded Plant Spartanburg for electric production. BMW announced the plan in October 2022. Finished packs now travel by truck between the two plants, a supply line of about 15 miles. That proximity is the strategy BMW calls local for local: batteries built beside the vehicles that take them, instead of shipped across an ocean.

The iX5 is the start, not the endpoint. BMW plans to assemble at least six fully electric vehicles at Spartanburg by 2030, according to board member Raymond Wittmann, who spoke at the opening. Robert Engelhorn, president and CEO of BMW Manufacturing in Spartanburg, said the Woodruff packs will power the next generation of fully electric BMW X models from the plant. A fifth Gen6 battery site, in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, follows in 2027.

The ground carries a local footnote. The Woodruff property, along SC-101, is the former home of the S.J. Workman Peach Farm. BMW handed out peach pins at the opening to mark the site's history. The wider footprint is large by any measure: a University of South Carolina study put Plant Spartanburg's annual economic output in the state at $36.1 billion in 2026. Woodruff now plugs the battery half of that operation into the same ground.

One part of the supply chain still crosses an ocean. Woodruff assembles packs; it doesn't manufacture cells. The cells arrive from supplier AESC, shipped in from China, and BMW's longer-term plan adds United States cell production from LG Energy Solution in the late 2020s. Until then, the plant's local-for-local claim covers assembly, testing and delivery, while the most energy-dense component in the pack starts its journey overseas. The gap is worth naming because it's the same gap the whole American battery industry is trying to close.