PowerCo, BMW and Nissan Lead a Busy Week for Automotive Manufacturing Investment

A cluster of major investment and labour announcements is reshaping how automakers plan their production footprints in Europe and North America. According to the latest industry manufacturing roundup from Automotive World, three themes stand out this week: battery joint ventures, plant modernisation, and the restructuring of legacy labour agreements.

The most significant financial commitment comes from PowerCo and Gotion, which intend to channel roughly €3.22bn (US$3.68bn) into three separate joint ventures covering battery cells and materials. The scale of the figure underscores how aggressively battery supply chains are being localised rather than simply sourced from a handful of dominant Asian cell makers. Splitting the effort across multiple ventures also suggests a strategy of sharing technical risk and capital outlay between partners rather than betting on a single mega-plant.

On the vehicle side, BMW is putting €2bn (US$2.34bn) into three sites in Bavaria to prepare for the next-generation 3 Series. Spending this kind of money on existing German locations, rather than greenfield plants elsewhere, signals that BMW sees its home base as central to the electric transition of its highest-volume sedan nameplate. The investment is likely to cover retooling and production line upgrades rather than entirely new capacity.

Nissan, meanwhile, has set an ambitious localisation target: building 80% of the vehicles it sells in the United States within the country by the end of 2030. Tariff exposure and shifting trade rules have pushed several manufacturers toward similar goals, though few have attached such a precise number to a fixed deadline. Reaching that share would require meaningful expansion of US assembly and supplier capacity over the next several years.

The week’s labour news is less comfortable. Volkswagen has given notice to end several collective agreements effective 31 December 2026 as it resumes negotiations over its labour deal with IG Metall. Ending existing agreements is a legally significant step that typically precedes harder bargaining over pay, working time and job security, and it lands at a moment when German manufacturers are weighing cost cuts against the heavy spending needed for electrification.