A $750-million investment that BMW Group announced in 2008 for the BMW Manufacturing Co. facility in Spartanburg, SC, paid off in earnest today as the BMW X3 went into production. Whereas the first-gen X3 had been made in Austria, BMW has consolidated its X models in Spartanburg, as the X5 and X6 are also produced there.

The $750-million was spent on building a new assembly hall for the X3 and an expansion of the facility’s paint shop to accommodate the additional production. This increase of a total of 1.5-million square feet of production capacity brings the plant’s total footprint to 4-million square-feet. And since 1992, BMW has invested some $4.6-billion in South Carolina.