Mercedes-Benz starts production of the electric C-Class at its expanded Kecskemét plant

Mercedes-Benz has opened two new production halls at its Kecskemét plant in Hungary and begun building the new all-electric C-Class there. The company says it is the first time the site has manufactured a battery-electric core model.

The expansion took the plant’s footprint from 200 to 440 hectares. Alongside the bodywork and assembly halls, Mercedes-Benz built a second press shop, a new paint shop and a battery assembly facility. The company invested around €1 billion in the site, and says Kecskemét will be the largest automotive production site in Hungary. More than 5,000 people work there.

Body parts and the drive batteries for the electric GLB and C-Class are produced on site, which Mercedes-Benz describes as a local-for-local approach. The plant runs a dual production model: the existing hall builds combustion and battery-electric vehicles flexibly on a single line, and the newly built hall is geared to fully electric vehicles. Mercedes-Benz says that lets it adapt production volumes to market demand.

Digital production in the new halls is built on MO360, the company’s production data platform, which Mercedes-Benz says links production, quality and supply chain data across its sites. The company says Kecskemét is also the first of its plants where it has created a complete digital replica of an entire assembly hall.

That “Digital Factory Twin,” built in NVIDIA Omniverse, simulates individual production steps and tracks process flows across the manufacture of the electric C-Class before they run on the real line, according to Mercedes-Benz. The company also says its MO360 Vision System supports quality control with camera-based applications and can detect defects on the vehicle in real time.

A 240,000 m² open-space solar park west of the plant has a capacity of 27.4 MWp. Together with rooftop arrays on the new battery assembly, body-in-white and final assembly halls, on-site photovoltaics reach 42.3 MWp, which Mercedes-Benz says covers around 25% of the plant’s annual energy requirement. The new paint shop cuts energy consumption by around 20% compared with the existing facility and CO₂ emissions by around 80%, according to the company.

Kecskemét sits in a European production network for the Mercedes Modular Architecture (MMA) platform, alongside the Rastatt plant in southern Germany. Mercedes-Benz will be able to build the electric GLC at Bremen or Kecskemét depending on demand, and a more compact version of the G-Class will be produced exclusively in Kecskemét.

Source: Mercedes-Benz Group