Embotech and BMW announced on October 27 that they have passed one million vehicles moved driverless inside plants, across four factories in Germany and the UK. The system has run since a 2022 pilot. The key design decision: the sensors sit in the hall, not in the car.
Key takeaways
- Around 3,500 vehicle movements a day at system availability above 99.5%
- Four plants: Dingolfing, Leipzig and Regensburg in Germany plus MINI Plant Oxford in the UK
- The first 500,000 movements took 15 months, the next 500,000 took seven
- Hesai lidars are mounted in the building, so the vehicle needs no hardware modification
- Servers recompute the driving trajectory ten times per second
What happens to a car after it leaves the line?
A MINI rolls off the assembly line in Oxford. Someone has to move it — to a buffer lot or onto a truck. Normally a driver gets into every single unit and covers that route by hand.
At production measured in hundreds of thousands of units a year, that is thousands of short trips a day, each needing a person. Add the scratches and knocks that come from manual manoeuvring in a tight hall.
Embotech automates exactly that leg. The system is called Automated Driving In-Plant and is independent of vehicle brand and model.
But a problem follows: a factory-fresh car has no cameras, no lidar and no onboard computer for autonomous driving.
That is the obstacle the architecture the company describes is built to clear.
Where does this system's perception live?
The answer inverts road-going autonomous cars. There the sensors are in the vehicle. Here they are in the building.
Perception for AVM is in the infrastructure — vehicles don't need self-driving capabilities or extra sensors. Hesai lidars are mounted in the production environment, so there are no hardware modifications. In the factory, we have a standardized software interface, offboard computers, and servers that optimize driving trajectories 10 times per second.
Eva Beck, chief commercial officer at Embotech, speaking to The Robot Report
The car only receives commands, delivered through its existing drive-by-wire systems. Embotech's software handles perception, prediction and path planning. A fleet manager pulls destinations from the OEM's back-end systems, defines routes and manages communication between vehicles.
A second layer runs separately: a deterministic architecture independently certified by TÜV SÜD that defines and enforces the safety boundary. That is the standard split in safety-critical autonomous systems — one layer optimises, the other refuses to let it cross hard limits.
The diagram shows the usual arrangement inverted: intelligence and sensors sit in the building, and the vehicle receives a finished command. The decision node is the layer that stops optimisation from crossing the safety boundary.
What do these names mean?
A handful of abbreviations in the announcement decide how to read that million.
- SAE Level 4 — the autonomy level at which a vehicle manages without a human inside a defined operating domain. Outside that domain the system simply does not run, rather than asking a driver to take over.
- Drive-by-wire — steering, throttle and brake controlled by electrical signal instead of mechanical linkage. Without it, no external command can reach the car.
- AVM — Automated Vehicle Marshalling, moving finished vehicles around the plant grounds. In automotive logistics, marshalling is the act of ordering cars for dispatch.
- ATS — Autonomous Tractor Solution, Embotech's second certified product, covering yard tractors hauling trailers. Both systems share one platform.
- TÜV SÜD — the German certification body. Its stamp on the safety layer matters more here than the algorithm's performance, because without it the system never enters a plant.
Together these explain why the company stresses certification over capability: in a factory the obstacle is not driving quality but clearance to operate.
Why not just fit the car with sensors?
The simpler route looks obvious: add cameras and lidar to the car, as on road-going autonomous vehicles.
The problem is that this is a car about to reach a customer. Fitting and removing a sensor kit on every unit would mean an extra line operation, hardware cost and a risk of damaging the finished product.
Sensors in the hall carry another advantage: they see the whole scene, not just what one vehicle sees. The system works alongside factory workers and manually driven cars, in all weather, and slots into existing processes rather than rebuilding them.
Is it live yet?
Yes, it is a production deployment across four plants. Since the 2022 pilot the system has reached around 3,500 movements a day at availability above 99.5%. Embotech notes that much of the market remains at the pilot stage, running only a limited number of vehicles.
The pace has accelerated. The first 500,000 automated movements with BMW took 15 months, the second 500,000 took seven. Embotech's Munich team worked with BMW on tooling for deployment, monitoring, diagnosis and recovery.
| Stage | Movements | Duration |
|---|---|---|
| First | 500,000 | 15 months |
| Second | 500,000 | 7 months |
Embotech spun out?Spin-out: A company separated from a university or larger organisation to commercialise technology developed there. of ETH Zurich in 2013 and is based in Zurich. The company says it is the first worldwide to hold multiple TÜV-certified Level 4 solutions. In July it entered a partnership with HTEC to scale deployment.
Why does this matter?
Autonomy inside a closed, instrumented area turns out to be more mature than autonomy on public roads — not because the algorithms are better, but because the problem was narrowed. A million movements at 99.5% availability is an operating figure, not a demo one. It shows where autonomy actually earns money in the near term: wherever the environment around the machine may be rebuilt.
What's next?
- Automated Driving In-Plant is slated for rollout next year at BMW's Spartanburg plant in South Carolina — the same factory where BMW has tested Figure AI humanoids.
- Embotech says it will extend to further use cases, sites, customers and industrial environments
- The HTEC partnership struck in July 2026 is meant to scale deployment across more vehicles and customer programs
Sources
- The Robot Report — Embotech and BMW move 1M vehicles with automated driving technology
- Embotech — Automated Vehicle Marshalling
- Embotech — Autonomous Tractor Solution
- Embotech — Embotech and HTEC announce strategic partnership
