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      10-30-2016, 05:23 PM   #38
Gatte
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BMW also ships engines out to their other plants. When I was at the Welt and took the tour we actually saw an M4 being produced and fitted with an engine. They even showed us a room which only housed engines I think (little fuzzy about this). The tour guide specifically told us that the Munich plant does not manufacture these engines and that they are pre-assembled before coming into Munich from Regensburg which he told us was close to Munich.

If we look at what's happening at Leipzig, it looks like the B58 was just added into that plant recently. I strongly believe that this was supposed to be the N55 replacement and the long term plan for the Leipzig plant is to produce just the B58 engine. The N55s that are being used on the existing M2s are probably the last few from the plant or are being assembled by a small %age of assembly stations at the plant.

The M2 (Future variant or CS/CSL/GTS) is probably going to have the B58 or ship some S55s from the closest plant to Leipzig. We can speculate which one. From a tooling and production standpoint, it is very expensive to manufacture two separate engines from the base up. You could use delayed differentiation (toyota does this a a lot) to reduce the costs significantly but 2 completely different engines will be expensive. For Eg: Manufacturing an N55 and a modified N55 will be a lot cheaper than and N55 and B58.
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