A great passion begins
Power: “286 HP!” Displacement: “3800 ccm!” Price: “65,000 D-marks!” Many of today’s adults will surely remember the early 1970s and the boundless excitement a handful of cards could cause in children’s rooms. Quartet games were often where great passions began. They were for cars, motorbikes, aeroplanes, ships – but for automobile production? Not so many people are likely to remember that.
Little plastic box, big story
An example of this dating from 1971 has now been discovered in the BMW Group Archive. The quartet’s title: “This is how a car is made”, a “technology and trump game” by the “F.X. Schmid Vereinigte Münchener Spielkarten-Fabriken KG” playing-card company. Open the plastic lid of the little box and you are transported on a veritable journey through time. The quartet game shows on 28 cards divided into seven themed groups how BMW built their cars in the late 1960s – from initial design to finished product. Each card shows a photo and explains what is on it using categories such as “picture information” and “text information”. Each step of the creation process has a value such as “320” or “180” to make the quartet a competitive game.
Automobile production without computers
The first card, 1a, shows the BMW “style office” at the end of the 1960s. Of course, there were no computers yet. People modelled car bodies out of plaster or plastic. The text on the card comments: “The style office designs the body shapes, with certain dimensions and data already specified. All the other driving elements, such as the engine and number of seats, must also be taken into account. Value 320”. The following card explains how the prototype was created, using a BMW 02 as an example. Another picture also shows a vehicle of the Neue Klasse of the time.
Looking back from the future
Other cards of the quartet explain car body construction, where you see people welding components on. Axles and brakes are just as much a topic as the upholstery shop, where seat frames are upholstered, including using foam rubber. Each vehicle goes into the shower room to be sprayed with ten atmospheres of overpressure water to test for leaks. The cold room tests the engine’s ability to start under conditions even as extreme as -30 degrees Celsius. Finally, the “finishing hall” is shown, today known simply as “finishing”. The quartet game takes a unique look back at our company at a time that was groundbreaking for the future of BMW.
The Neue Klasse heralds a new era – then as well as now
Another thing that is interesting about this discovery from the archive is that the current vehicles still go through basically the same production steps as the quartet shows. The only real differences: automation and digitalisation have transformed production; today, robots and machines carry out many tasks. But the constant between the era of yesteryear and today is that once again, the Neue Klasse heralds the transformation of our company. This quartet, a treasure trove full of nostalgia, is further proof that even though the BMW Group stands for tradition, it has always championed progress.
If you are interested in finding out more facts about the historic Neue Klasse vehicles, you can browse here on the BMW Group Archive research platform.