I would have loved to take a factory tour of BMW’s plant in Munich. However, the presence of two small children made this problematic, while being in town on a weekend made it totally impossible. Therefore, I decided to settle for the next best thing – a visit to the BMW Museum.
The BMW Museum is located at the head offices of BMW next to Olympiapark, site of the ill-fated 1972 Summer Games. A stroll in this pleasant park after a visit to the museum would be the ideal way to end the afternoon. It was not to be…
Exiting from the underground station, it is easy to find BMW. Its gleaming head offices resemble four offices, around 24-floor-high cylinders seemingly suspended from a central pillar. It still looks ultramodern, even 30 years after it was constructed. However, large areas around it were fenced off for construction purposes, and it soon became apparent that the museum is closed and will remain so until a BMW Experience Center opens in 2006. BMW clearly took a cue from Volkswagen’s huge and massively popular Autostadt in Wolfsburg and is erecting a large center to showcase its cars and technology.
We had to make do with a small BMW Pavilion inside the Olympiapark. Here around 20 cars and a few motorcycles are on display, ranging from the humble Dixie that started the car production in the 1920s to more modern vehicles. Particularly popular are the BMW 328, which looked marvelous in silver, and the BMW Isetta, a small two-seater with three wheels and a door opening to the front. The Isetta and similar mini-cars made Germans mobile again during the 1950s. Also on display are a few items of BMW’s aviation history – between the two world wars, BMW was primarily famous for its aircraft engines. This is reflected in the company’s blue-and-white emblem that resembles an aircraft propeller. The emblem also reminds one of the blue-and-white check colors of the Bavarian flag. BMW is the abbreviation for Bayerische Motoren Werken (Bavarian Motor (Engine) Works).
A farther away tent housed a few of BMW’s racing cars and in between the two locales was parked a fleet of around 20 BMW Bobby cars. In contrast to her parents, who ordered a car in good faith 2 months before a demonstration model was available, toddler Becks insisted on test-driving every one before settling on a blue-and-white one with a hubcap missing from the front right wheel. If you want to see BMW’s slogan, Freude am Fahren (Joy of Driving), in action, ignore NASCAR, ignore Formula 1, and ignore boy-racers in overpriced GTIs. Simply let loose a bunch of toddlers on Bobby Cars in a large, unrestricted space.
We finally managed to drag her away to stroll in Olympiapark to see the famous tent-like glass roof, which was finished on time but over budget, and just bask in the glorious sunshine with a few thousand others on this late October Sunday afternoon.