On Thursday, 25 January 2018, representatives of the BMW Group, the Karlovy Vary region and the company Sokolovská uhelná signed a contract on construction of BMW’s test centre. The test centre will be located on an approximately 500 ha site near the city of Sokolov in the Karlovy Vary region. The centre is expected to be put into operation after 2020. 

Several hundred people will find work at the planned test centre, where the BMW Group will, for example, continue development in the areas of electromobility, digitalisation, autonomous driving and assistance systems. The total investment will be in the range of hundreds of millions of euros. The centre will be the company’s first development facility in Eastern Europe, CzechInvest Government Agency informed.