BMW, with Nvidia tech, plans Hungary factory in virtual-only mode

BMW Group has started "virtual production" in collaboration with Nvidia at its coming factory in Debrecen, Hungary, where it will build full-electric cars on the Neue Klasse platform starting in 2025.

The partnership between BMW Group and Nvidia is based on the tech company’s Omniverse platform, which allows companies to create digital twins of their industrial facilities and processes. 

The digital twins can be used to plan and modify production to save time, space and money, and improve outcomes such as initial quality and worker safety, among other benefits.

Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, and Milan Nedeljkovic, BMW’s production chief, announced the global rollout of virtual planning for all BMW factories on Tuesday at Nvidia’s annual GTC developers’ conference.

"Virtual factory integration can save billions for the world’s industries," Huang said in a keynote address.

Other companies that are using Nvidia’s Omniverse platform include Jaguar Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Rimac and EV start-up Lucid    

Construction has just started at the Debrecen factory, which is set to open in 2025, but BMW is already testing processes and modifications in its digital twin. BMW says it is the first facility that will be completely virtually planned and validated.

BMW's factory in Regensburg is now fully digitally mapped, and its digital twin is being used for planning future plant structures and configurations. Other BMW plants with digital twins include its U.S. factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and its Munich facility. 

In an online demonstration at the developers’ conference, BMW workers showed how adding a robot to a production workstation could be done in the virtual world, including rearranging parts bins.

BMW said that the cloud-based Omniverse platform would be available in a wider scale to experts in various departments starting at the end of March.

The automaker calls its digital-focused production system iFactory. It began preparing for digital twins several years ago by scanning its factories in three dimensions, a process that was started in 2020 and is expected to be completed this year. Any modifications will be scanned again and entered into the digital twin to ensure it remains up to date.

Nvidia, which says it has $11 billion worth of automotive orders in its pipeline, also announced that China's BYD will use the Nvidia Drive Orin central computing platform in its Ocean and Dynasty series of cars.

Nvidia is competing with other tech giants, including Qualcomm and Mobileye, for market share in tech-focused automotive megatrends such as electrification, autonomous driving, connectivity and infotainment.

Last September it showed a high-performance automotive computer called Drive Thor that can control autonomous driving, advanced driver assist systems (ADAS), infotainment, digital instrument clusters and occupant monitoring. Such a powerful computer can control multiple domains on a single system-on-chip (SoC) rather than on multiple electronic control units (ECUs).