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The production and assembly of a BMW Z4 Roadster is the star of a television
documentary made by the acclaimed National Geographic Channel.
The “Ultimate Factories” television show was shown in the United States in
late November. The hour-long program is a one-of-a-kind,
behind-the-scenes tour of the high-tech manufacturing plants that create this
Ultimate Driving Machine.
The National Geographic Channel team spent a week in Germany, filming at the
factory in the Bavarian heartland of Landshut, where the automotive industry's
lightest (aluminium and magnesium) six-cylinder crankcase is made alongside the
BMW Sauber F1 Team’s V8 Formula One engines.
The crew also visited the Munich factory that assembles 1,200 engines a day,
and then travelled to the US for a week-long shoot at BMW Manufacturing in rural
South Carolina where every BMW Z4 is built. The program highlights BMW's
environmental innovation by being the world's first automotive factory to
recycle landfill methane gas from rubbish to power its plant.
Methane gas routed from the nearby Palmetto Landfill provides BMW
Manufacturing Co. with 63 percent of all its power, reducing greenhouse gas
emissions in rural South Carolina by 60,000 tons per year - the equivalent of
4,300 cars driving around the equator every year.
The only BMW plant in
the US has 4,500 associates - and almost 500 robots - that produce 600 vehicles
a day. Each Z4 Roadster is 40 hours in build travelling from the Body Shop
to the Paint Shop and then Final Assembly.
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