On a recent, rainy Sunday afternoon Frau A and I went to the BMW museum. We had already visited the Porsche and Mercedes museums in Stuttgart, but somehow always put off BMW even though it is local. With 250,000 visitors per year, it's the third most popular museum in Munich (after the Deutsches Museum and Museum of Modern Art).
The BMW museum is basically next to the Olympiapark and use the same U-bahn stop. The museum is the bowl-shaped building on the right below:
The tall building is the BMW world headquarters, in the form of a four-cylinder engine.
NOTE: The BMW museum is different from the Porsche and Mercedes museum in that it is organized by topic rather than in a strict timeline format. The timeline format is nice in that you see how technology developed, but the BMW format lets enthusiasts of specific product types get their fix in one room!
At the beginning of the museum it is clear that BMW is big on motorcycles. They produced motorcycles exclusively for 10 years before building their first automobile. Here is the first BMW:
BMW R32, 3000 were produced from 1923-1926. Two cylinder + over-head valve engine, 8.5bhp, capable 100km/h (62mph).
There's a YouTube video of an original R32 in action:
The museum is also quick to show BMW's technology and racing orientation, with lists of innovative "firsts" and record-setting performances. The enclosed motorcycle below is the "WR 500" -- WR stands for "weltrekord" (world record), but this bike is also referred to as "Das Ei" (the egg). It's top speed of 173.8mph was set in 1937 and this mark lasted 14 years (aided, of course, by the WWII period that was focused on other technological challenges).
In this room are more racing bikes, with and without sidecars!
The motorcycle rooms were packed - there seemed to be a lot of die hards that spent more time here than other places in the museum. My favorite was the late 1990's "Cruiser", which could be described as a Harley-like BMW.
BMW R1200c "Cruiser". 1997-2004. 2-cylinder "boxer" (flat-twin) engine, 61bhp, reaches 168km/h (104 mph).
In the next posts, we'll move on to the automobile rooms...
And now that we've visited the Porsche, Mercedes, and now BMW museums, there is one big one left - Volkswagon in Wolfsburg (don't think Audi has a museum in Ingolstadt). Maybe this winter...