Car2Car: BMW Group Demonstrates an Industrial Material Loop from End-of-Life Vehicle to New Vehicle.

Together with a broad consortium of industry and academic partners, the BMW Group has completed a research project that shows just how much more is actually possible in the automotive industry's circular economy. The project is called Car2Car, and it delivers concrete figures on how much material from an end-of-life vehicle can genuinely flow back into a new vehicle – when processing is consistently optimized.

What is the Car2Car rate?

At the heart of the project is a newly defined metric: the so-called Car2Car rate. Rather than simply measuring whether a material is recycled, it captures whether it can be recovered at a quality level sufficient for use in new vehicle applications. That's a considerably higher bar than conventional recycling rates, since materials from end-of-life vehicles often contain contaminants that have so far prevented high-quality reuse.

From 6 to 51 percent

Using today's standard market processes and minimal mandatory disassembly, the consortium achieved a Car2Car rate of just 6 percent across all five material groups studied. With optimized process routes and expanded sorting and processing technology, however, this figure could be increased to 51 percent – a considerable leap that shows where the real potential lies.

The results for metals are especially striking:

• Steel: from 1 to 81 percent

• Aluminum: from 23 to 52 percent

• Copper: from 48 to 68 percent

For plastics and glass, on the other hand, significant technological development is still needed. Material diversity, complex composite structures, and the automotive industry's high quality requirements continue to make it difficult to produce high-quality recyclates here.

The steel breakthrough from Leipzig

One highlight of the project is the proof of concept using steel. Until now, copper-containing contaminants from cables and connectors have made it difficult to feed end-of-life vehicle scrap back into high-quality automotive steel. Within Car2Car, targeted classification of the steel scrap significantly reduced copper contamination – a process that has since been filed for patent.

The resulting steel coils passed material and quality testing and were used in industrial production at the BMW Group plant in Leipzig: more than 100,000 series-production parts made from recovered Car2Car steel were produced there and built into vehicles. The whole process was tested using 433 end-of-life vehicles from 60 different BMW Group models, most of which were no more than five years old.

A heavyweight consortium

Car2Car wasn't tackled by BMW alone. Alongside BMW AG, participants included TU Bergakademie Freiberg, the Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology at HZDR, TU Munich, Scholz Recycling, STEINERT UniSort, thyssenkrupp Steel Europe, Salzgitter Mannesmann Forschung, Aurubis, Novelis Germany, OETINGER Aluminium, and Pilkington Automotive Germany – a cross-section of the entire value chain, from vehicle manufacturing through materials production to the recycling industry.

Potential, not standard practice

BMW explicitly stresses that Car2Car does not represent what is already industry standard today, but rather shows what potential could be realized in the future. Whether that happens depends on several factors: access to end-of-life vehicles, suitable market conditions, necessary investment in disassembly, sorting, and recycling infrastructure, and viable business models across the entire chain. The upcoming European ELV (End-of-Life Vehicles) regulation is also likely to play an important role here going forward.

Why this matters

For the automotive industry, results like these are more than just a sustainability project for image purposes. Car2Car provides a solid data foundation for further developing design-for-circularity approaches – that is, vehicles designed from the outset so their materials can be recovered at the highest possible quality at end of life. Collaboration with end-of-life vehicle recycling partners like PreZero is also expected to benefit from the insights gained.

Source: BMW Group press release, August 10, 2026

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