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In 1999, BMW countered the Mercedes M-Class with its own “sports activity vehicle,” the X5. It was a huge sales hit, as customers in droves decided they no longer wanted to drive sedans and preferred SUVs instead. BMW officially debuted the fifth-generation X5 this week, which incorporates many of the latest ideas that have gone into the company’s Neue Klasse vehicles. It will be built primarily in Spartanburg, South Carolina, at a factory that has just finished a $1.7 billion revitalization.
Since 1994, that factory has assembled more than 7.3 million vehicles, with 412,799 BMW X models built in 2025 alone, the seventh time output has exceeded 400,000 units in a single year, reports Automotive Manufacturing Solutions. Roughly half of current production is exported to nearly 120 countries, helping make BMW the leading automotive exporter in the United States by value, with close to 3 million vehicles shipped from US soil worth more than $113 billion to date.
Across nearly 30 US locations in 12 states and more than 400 suppliers, BMW says its American operations now support over 120,000 jobs and contribute more than $43.3 billion annually to the US economy. With the X5 having sold more than 3 million units globally since 1999 — a third of them in the United States — Spartanburg’s role as the model’s global home looks set to deepen rather than diminish as electrification proceeds.
