BMW’s first car was a license-built Austin Seven, and it took the company about three years to build almost 16,000 of them. BMW Group plants now build that many in under three days, and the BMW brand’s total since 1928 has reached roughly 67 million cars, a BMW spokesperson told BMWBLOG. We had asked how many cars BMW has built in its 110-year history, and the answer came with a caveat: “It’s difficult to say but we are at roughly 67 million cars since 1928.”

The hedge is fair. The count spans almost a century, including a war that cost BMW its only car factory, and today the cars come from more than 30 production sites worldwide. The total covers the BMW brand only, so none of today’s MINI and Rolls-Royce cars are part of it.

BMW Car History At A Glance, From 1916 To 2026 Year Milestone 1916 Bayerische Flugzeugwerke founded on March 7, BMW’s official founding date 1923 R 32, BMW’s first motorcycle 1928 BMW takes over Fahrzeugfabrik Eisenach and the Dixi 3/15 1929 BMW 3/15 PS DA 2, the first car with the BMW badge 1933 303, BMW’s first six-cylinder car and first kidney grille 1940 328 Touring Coupe wins the Mille Miglia 1952 501, the first BMW car built in Bavaria, enters production 1955 Isetta production begins 1959 Quandt family keeps BMW independent; 700 launched 1962 Neue Klasse 1500 enters production 1966 1600-2 starts the 02 Series; BMW takes over Glas and Dingolfing 1968 2002, New Six sedans and E9 coupes 1972 5 Series; BMW Motorsport GmbH founded 1973 Rosslyn, South Africa becomes BMW’s first plant outside Germany 1975 3 Series 1977 7 Series 1978 M1 1986 M3; Regensburg starts production 1987 750i, BMW’s first V12 1994 Spartanburg starts production; Rover Group acquired 1999 X5, BMW’s first SUV 2001 New MINI goes on sale, built in Oxford 2003 Rolls-Royce Phantom built at Goodwood; BMW Brilliance joint venture formed 2005 Leipzig starts series production 2013 i3, BMW’s first all-electric production car 2019 San Luis Potosí, Mexico starts production 2025 Neue Klasse iX3 production starts in Debrecen, Hungary 2026 Roughly 67 million BMW-brand cars built since 1928, according to BMW Why Does BMW Start Counting Its Cars In 1928 And Not 1916?

BMW officially dates its founding to March 7, 1916, when Bayerische Flugzeugwerke was formed in Munich from Gustav Otto’s aircraft factory. The BMW name itself came from a different company: in 1917, Karl Rapp’s aircraft engine firm became Bayerische Motoren Werke, and a 1922 reshuffle moved the name and the engine business over to Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, which is why its founding date counts.

Motorcycles came before cars. The R 32, designed by Max Friz, debuted at the 1923 Berlin Motor Show with an air-cooled boxer engine and shaft drive, a layout BMW Motorrad still builds. When the company finally moved into automobiles, it bought its way in. In the fall of 1928 it took over Fahrzeugfabrik Eisenach, a struggling carmaker in Thuringia that was building the Dixi 3/15 PS under license from Austin, and the Dixi was an Austin Seven in everything but the badge.

BMW kept the little car in production and kept improving it. From July 1929, the updated BMW 3/15 PS DA 2 became the first car to wear the BMW roundel, and its biggest change was brakes on all four wheels. The name was honest about its ambitions: 3 was the taxable horsepower rating and 15 was the actual output. A roadster version, the 3/15 DA 3 Wartburg, followed in 1930 as BMW’s first sporty car.

BMW says almost 16,000 3/15s were built between March 1929 and February 1932, though some histories put the total as high as 18,976.

The First Kidney Grille And Six-Cylinder BMW Arrived In 1933 Photo: BMW Group Classic

The Austin license ran out in 1932, and BMW replaced the 3/15 with the 3/20, the first car it developed on its own. A year later came the car that set the template for everything since. The BMW 303 debuted at the Berlin Motor Show in February 1933 with BMW’s first six-cylinder engine, a 1,182-cc inline-six making 30 hp and good for 90 km/h (56 mph).

The 303 was also the first BMW with a kidney grille. The two tall openings were there to cool the longer six-cylinder, and 93 years later some version of them is still on the front of almost every BMW, for better and occasionally for worse.

BMW 328 Touring Coupé during the 1st Italian Mille Miglia Grand Prix in Brescia, April 28, 1940 (03/2010)

The 326 followed in 1936 as BMW’s first four-door sedan, and the same year brought the 328, the sports car that made BMW’s name in racing. Its biggest win came at the 1940 Mille Miglia, where a 328 Touring Coupe driven by Huschke von Hanstein and Walter Bäumer finished first. The 335 luxury sedan went on sale in 1939, but government orders stopped BMW car production in 1941.

For the rest of the war BMW built aircraft engines, more than 30,000 of them, and by 1945 forced laborers, including concentration camp prisoners, made up almost half of its workforce. It’s the darkest chapter in the company’s history. Every BMW car up to that point, from the first 3/15 to the 335, had been built in Eisenach, which is exactly where BMW’s car business nearly ended.

How BMW Lost Its Car Factory And Nearly Went Under

When Germany was divided after World War II, Eisenach ended up in the Soviet zone. Production restarted there with prewar BMW designs, and once BMW cut its legal ties to the plant, the cars carried the EMW name (Eisenacher Motoren Werke). Bristol in Britain, meanwhile, took the plans for the 327 and BMW’s six-cylinder engine as war reparations.

In Munich, Allied bans on vehicle production meant BMW spent the first postwar years making pots, pans and bicycles. Motorcycles returned in 1948, but the car business had to start over without a car plant or a car it could build.

The first attempt was expensive. The 501 luxury sedan premiered at the first Frankfurt Motor Show in 1951, but deliveries only started in late 1952, once body production was running at Baur in Stuttgart. It was the first BMW car built in Bavaria, and its rounded body earned it the nickname “Baroque Angel.” The 502 that followed was the first postwar German car with a V8. Both were heavy, and BMW lost money on them.

What kept the company going was a bubble car. BMW started building the Isetta, based on Iso’s Italian design and powered by a single-cylinder motorcycle engine, in April 1955. By the time production ended in 1962, 161,360 had been built. There’s a nice symmetry in that: BMW’s first car was a foreign small car built under license, and the car that kept it alive in the 1950s was another one.

The beautiful 503 and 507 arrived in 1955 and did nothing for the balance sheet. Neither did the 600, a stretched Isetta with a side door and a rear seat, of which about 35,000 were built between 1957 and 1959.

By 1959 BMW was close to bankruptcy, and management proposed a merger with Daimler-Benz. At the shareholders’ meeting on December 9, 1959, a lawyer representing BMW’s dealers stalled the vote, and the deal never happened. The Quandt family, led by Herbert Quandt, became the largest shareholder and recapitalized the company, which let BMW fill the orders piling up for the new Giovanni Michelotti-designed 700 and pay for what came next.

How The Neue Klasse And The 2002 Turned BMW Around In The 1960s

The car that turned the finances around was the BMW 1500. It was shown at the 1961 Frankfurt Motor Show, drew more orders than BMW could build, and went into production in 1962. The Neue Klasse (New Class) sedan introduced the Hofmeister kink in the C-pillar, and with its 1600, 1800 and 2000 siblings it gave BMW the profitable midsize car it had been missing. In 1963, BMW paid its first dividend since the war.

Demand outgrew Munich quickly. In 1966, BMW took over Hans Glas and its plant in Dingolfing, which still builds BMWs today.

A shorter two-door version, the 1600-2, debuted at the 1966 Geneva Motor Show and started the 02 Series. The 2002 followed in 1968, after product planner Helmut Werner Bönsch put a 2.0-liter M10 four-cylinder into his own 1600-2 and US importer Max Hoffman asked for a sportier car to sell in America. BMW built about 837,000 02 Series cars through 1977, including 1,672 examples of the 2002 turbo, which launched in 1973 as Europe’s first turbocharged production car just as the oil crisis hit.

The same year as the 2002, BMW introduced the M30 inline-six, the “New Six” 2500 and 2800 sedans and the E9 coupes. The E9 later spawned the 3.0 CSL, the car that turned BMW into a touring car powerhouse in the 1970s.

The 1970s Gave BMW The Model Names It Still Uses Today E12 BMW 520

The E12 5 Series arrived in 1972 and brought in the naming system BMW still uses. The same year, on May 1, BMW Motorsport GmbH started work with 35 employees under Jochen Neerpasch. Its 3.0 CSL won the touring car class at Le Mans in 1973 and took six European Touring Car Championships between 1973 and 1979.

BMW also started building cars outside Germany. In 1973 it took full ownership of an assembly operation in Rosslyn, South Africa, its first plant abroad, and 5 Series production started there in 1974.

The E21 3 Series followed in 1975, built in Munich, then the 6 Series coupe in 1976 and the 7 Series in 1977. For the first time, BMW had a full lineup from compact sedan to flagship. The decade closed with the M1 in 1978, a mid-engine car BMW Motorsport developed for racing and also sold as a road car, with 277 hp and a DM 100,000 price.

From The E30 M3 To The X5: How BMW Grew In The 1980s And 1990s

The E30 3 Series arrived in 1982 and turned the 3 Series from a two-door sedan into a full range, eventually adding a convertible, a Touring wagon and an M3. BMW Motorsport’s road cars multiplied in the same years: the M535i in 1980, the hand-built M5 in 1984 with a 286-hp six derived from the M1’s engine, and the M3 in 1986, developed for racing and the road at the same time.

The decade filled in plenty of other firsts. BMW’s first diesel arrived in 1983 and its first all-wheel-drive car, the 325iX, in 1985. In October 1987 the 750i went into production with BMW’s first V12, a 5.0-liter making 300 hp. The 8 Series coupe followed at the 1989 Frankfurt show with the same engine, though only about 30,600 were built before it ended in 1999.

Production moved closer to customers. Regensburg opened in 1986 with the E30, and in 1994 BMW started building cars in the US at Spartanburg in South Carolina, beginning with a 318i. The Z3 roadster followed there in 1995 and the X5, BMW’s first SUV, in 1999. Spartanburg has since passed six million cars.

BMW also went shopping. In 1994 it bought the Rover Group from British Aerospace, a deal that went badly enough that BMW sold Rover in 2000. It came out of that period with two brands it still owns: MINI and, through a 1998 agreement for the name, Rolls-Royce.

MINI, Rolls-Royce, China And Electric Cars Shaped The 2000s And 2010s

The new MINI went on sale in July 2001, built at Plant Oxford in England, and the first Rolls-Royce of the BMW era, the Phantom, came out of a new factory at Goodwood in 2003. Neither brand counts toward the 67 million, which covers BMW-badged cars only.

BMW’s production map kept spreading. The BMW Brilliance joint venture in Shenyang, China, was formed in March 2003, and BMW raised its stake to 75 percent in 2022. Leipzig started series production with the E90 3 Series in March 2005 and built its four millionth car in December 2025. San Luis Potosí in Mexico opened in 2019 and now builds the 3 Series, the 2 Series Coupe and the M2.

The cars changed underneath, too. The i3 launched in 2013 as BMW’s first all-electric production car, and Leipzig built more than 250,000 of them by 2022. It was followed by the i8 plug-in hybrid sports car in 2014 and plug-in versions of the 3 Series and 7 Series, the 330e and 740e, in 2016. By 2025, fully electric models made up around 18 percent of BMW Group sales.

Which BMW Model Has Been Built The Most?

The 3 Series, and it isn’t close. BMW says it has built more than 18 million 3 Series since 1975, at 18 plants in 13 countries. That means more than one in four BMWs ever made is a 3 Series. The E46 generation alone sold 3,266,885 units, which BMW says makes it the brand’s best-selling model ever.

The 3 Series also built the factories. Every new BMW plant since Regensburg has started production with a 3 Series, with the new Debrecen plant in Hungary the only exception. Regensburg alone has built 8.7 million cars.

How Fast Is BMW Adding To The 67 Million Today?

In 2025, BMW Group plants built 2,456,561 BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce cars, or about 6,700 a day. The BMW brand on its own delivered 2,169,761 cars to customers that year, and Spartanburg remains its biggest single factory. Since the spokesperson’s figure counts only BMW-brand cars, the company is adding a little over two million a year to it, which would put 70 million within reach around 2028.

The newest contributor carries an old name. Series production of the Neue Klasse iX3 started at Debrecen in late October 2025, and the plant built its 50,000th iX3 nine months later, which BMW calls the fastest ramp-up of any new plant it has opened. The Neue Klasse i3 sedan followed in Munich in August 2026, and around 40 new and updated models with Neue Klasse technology are due by the end of 2027.

BMW used the Neue Klasse name once before, on the 1500 that pulled the company back from the edge in the 1960s. Sixty-five years later, it’s betting the next few million cars on it again.

First published by https://www.bmwblog.com