BMW has thrown its Steyr plant into overdrive faster than it ever intended. The Austrian site has switched to a second shift because demand for the iX3 and the rest of the Neue Klasse family has blown the original schedule apart.
Right now Steyr is turning out more than 4,000 electric motors a week — and BMW openly admits the two-shift operation has not hit its ceiling yet. The official forecast for 2026 is well above 100,000 motors. But if the current pace holds, the year could close at more than 200,000 units. Every single motor is shipped to Debrecen in Hungary, where it goes onto the rear axle of the BMW iX3.
This is the sixth generation of eDrive. It is an electrically excited synchronous motor: in the standard iX3 it produces 240 kW, or 326 hp, and 435 Nm. Up front, a more compact asynchronous motor comes from an outside supplier. And on the entry-level iX3 40 the rear motor is tuned differently — and here it gets strange: 320 hp and a full 500 Nm, more torque than the pricier version.
But buyers don’t care about the name Gen6. They care about range. And this is where BMW hits the sore spot of every EV sceptic. The iX3 promises 805 km on the WLTP cycle, and the upcoming i3, with a lighter, more aerodynamic body — remember this figure — is targeting 912 km. That is territory where an electric car stops feeling like a compromise next to a diesel crossover on long trips.
BMW is preparing the same tech package for the i3, the iX5 60 xDrive and the iX6. And the fight will not be limited to the Mercedes-Benz EQE SUV and the Audi Q6 e-tron. Chinese brands are already breathing down BMW’s neck — on price, on batteries, on charging speed. That is why Steyr matters not as a single plant, but as a signal: BMW wants to turn the Neue Klasse from a showcase project into the mass-production backbone for several classes at once.
