Article Summary
- BMW X3 G45 production in South Africa kicked off in October 2024.
- The X3 30e xDrive and 40d xDrive are exclusively made in Rosslyn.
- To date, the factory as built more than 1.8 million vehicles.
BMW started producing the fourth-generation X3 in South Africa on October 1, 2024. About a year and a half later, Plant Rosslyn is already celebrating an important milestone. The 100,000th vehicle has just rolled off the assembly line. It’s a Fire Red example in right-hand drive with a plug-in hybrid powertrain for a local customer.
The factory located north of Pretoria is the only BMW manufacturing facility that builds the X3 30e xDrive. It’s also the sole plant in the production network that makes the six-cylinder version, the X3 40d xDrive. Additionally, the X3 20 and X3 20d, with four-cylinder gasoline and diesel engines, are assembled at the same site. Every day, about 330 crossovers are completed during a three-shift operation.
The G45 generation has already reached a quarter of the G01’s output at the Rosslyn plant, where 403,114 units of the previous-generation X3 were produced between 2018 and 2024. The vast majority of X3s made in South Africa leave the country. Only four percent are purchased by local buyers, while 96 percent are exported. At full capacity, the factory can build up to 76,000 vehicles each year for more than 50 markets worldwide.
To date, the site has built more than 1.8 million vehicles, including several generations of the 3 Series. For 35 years, more than one million units of the 3 Series (E30, E36, E46, E90, and F30) were produced there until the X3 took over in 2018.
Fun fact: In 1973, BMW Group Plant Rosslyn became the company’s first manufacturing facility outside Germany. Around 92,000 E36s were made there between 1994 and 1998. The E46 that followed had a production run of 269,000 vehicles and was later surpassed by the E90 with a total of about 342,000 cars. The F30 was by far the most popular, with more than one million vehicles built in South Africa.
We were unable to find production numbers for the E30, but it was likely the 3 Series generation with the fewest cars built at Plant Rosslyn. As for the E21, the original model penned by Paul Bracq was produced exclusively at home in Munich.
