ABB lands 1,700-robot order for BMW Neue Klasse body shops

More than 1,700 large industrial robots will build BMW's Neue Klasse bodies, and every one of them will come from ABB Robotics. The order equips body shops at BMW's main plant in Munich and its Tiexi site in China, where the machines will weld, glue, rivet and assemble bodies for the new generation — in Munich including fully electric models.

That's a serious chunk of automation hardware for a single vehicle program. For scale: 1,700 units is roughly the population of a mid-sized car plant's entire welding line fleet, spread across two plants on two continents.

What exactly did BMW order?

The order spans ABB's IRB 6720 through IRB 6740 range plus the IRB 7720 — machines built for car body work and handling payloads as heavy as 620 kg. To put that in perspective, 620 kg is about the weight of three average adults; these are the heavy lifters of the body shop, not the nimble trim-line arms.

Every unit runs on ABB's latest OmniCore controller. The company claims the controller improves speed and precision while recovering energy to cut consumption. OmniCore can also connect AI, sensors, edge computing and the cloud, and ABB says its commissioning system shortens start-up — a practical gain when a new vehicle generation enters production at two plants at once.

Joerg Reger, Automotive Business Line Manager at ABB Robotics, said: "Our collaboration with the BMW Group underscores a shared vision of flexible and future-proof production. With our powerful robots and innovative OmniCore control platform, we are not only delivering maximum precision and efficiency, but also making a measurable contribution to energy savings and the digitalization of manufacturing."

Note the verbs: ABB says and claims. Supplier announcements are pitches until the production data confirms them.

Why does one spec on two continents matter?

Using the same robot and controller platform in Munich and Tiexi suggests BMW is standardising Neue Klasse body production across regions. In plain terms, one body shop recipe, replicated. That could simplify ramp-ups and make process data transferable between plants rather than translated.

Who wins the premium ground in China?

ABB securing high-payload body shop volume in China is the quieter headline. Domestic robot makers now lead China's overall robot sales, yet a premium automaker still handed its most demanding joining work to an established foreign supplier. Domestic leaders own the volume; the premium tier apparently still buys on track record.

There's also the energy angle. ABB frames OmniCore's energy recovery as a way to shrink the carbon footprint of vehicle manufacturing. When a supplier makes consumption a selling point, it's usually because buyers ask — plant-level emissions are becoming a specification factor in automation purchasing as automakers face pressure to report production decarbonisation in measurable terms. Energy use has quietly joined payload and repeatability on the spec sheet.

What to watch next

The milestones that will turn this announcement into a verified fact: the Neue Klasse launch itself, the ramp-up curves at Munich and Tiexi, and whether BMW replicates this single-platform approach at further plants. Until then, treat the efficiency claims as ABB's to prove.

1,700 robots, one controller, two continents. Now BMW has to make them earn it.