Designer drawing car; diverse settings. Designer drawing on computer with graphic tablet; diverse settings.

Sound Designer composing. Statement Sound Designer Yeah, so we’re currently developing the warning sounds or the auditory notices for the cars for messages from the car to the driver. So this can be like a warning, like: put on your seatbelt. Or it can be something more discreet like: Hey, I like to show you something, so please look on this display what I want to tell you. And these sounds are developed specifically for these cars. So another brand might sound different, but in this case we want for example to create sounds that are very modern but not in a cold modern way not in a distant way, but in a very warm way.Motorsound Settings; diverse settings. Statement Sound Designer If the sound fits with the visuals and with the character of the car, the total package, I think, gets added value. On the outside it’s a whole different area, because that allows us to shape the soundscape of traffic in the future. So this is a totally different area, where we can actually decide what do we want the streets to sound like.Drive simulation with sound; diverse settings. Group listening to the i3 sound and discuss.

Wind Tunnel Tests with clay model; diverse settings.

Crash preparations; diverse settings. Video and simulation of the crash; diverse settings. Statement Dr. Herbert Diess Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, Development Yes, that was the first crash with the serial production material. I think it looked pretty good. It certainly wasn't any worse than previous attempts. So I'm actually very optimistic but we still have to run an assessment. Evaluation after the crash.

BMW i3 driving outside. Test drives i3 in the snow diverse settings. Statement Test Ingenieur: The real problem issue in our day-to-day work is the whole subject of high voltage safety. The car is still at a very early stage of development. In terms of high voltage safety this means we have special components installed which won't be used later when the customer comes on the scene. Here you can see the emergency off button which we can use to deactivate the system. In here you can see the big orange box - the so-called insulation monitoring box - which shows us if there are any problems with the insulation of the high voltage system. From the customer perspective later on, all this will be automated and integrated in the control units. For example if we have a problem with the high voltage system in the event of an accident, it'll be switched off within milliseconds. And the customer will be in no danger at all. The really special feature about this automobile is the fact that the entire drivetrain is completely new. Both the lithium-ion cells and the drive electronics - the electric motor - simply form a completely new drive system which has never existed before in serial production vehicles. That's what makes it so exciting to work on this car. Test drives i8 in the snow; diverse settings.

Driving test i3 in the snow at the hills; diverse settings. Statement Test Driver: Even though the car doesn't appear to be at home in this environment, it has to be able to handle all the difficulties and be able to keep going. In this way customers can be sure of having fun as well as feeling safe. That's why we're now driving on snow-covered roads. Driving test i3 in the snow at the hills; diverse settings. Night drive.

Impressions of landscape. Test Drive i3 at the mountains; diverse settings. Statement Test Driver Here we have the unique opportunity to try out the car in truly worst case conditions. We have a lot of heat and a steep climb so we can really take the electric drive to its limits. This means that in terms of temperature, the components get really hot and we can test the worst case which the customer will virtually never have to deal with. We have an outdoor temperature of up to 40°C and can drive uphill non-stop over a distance of 1,000 metres - this really puts the components under maximum stress. Test Drive i3 at the mountains; diverse settings. Employees speaking about test drive. Test Drive i8 at the mountains; diverse settings. .

I3 driving in water groove. I8 driving in water groove. I3 driving in water; diverse settings. I8 driving in water; diverse settings.

"Our approach to start off was that I had the freedom to assemble my own team. That was a very positive place to start from because I was able to choose employees from within the organisation who I really thought were capable and who were curious or innovative enough but who also knew how to put this kind of thing into practice and get it into serial production. So this was the opportunity I was given, and I was also able to bring in people from the outside. That's a huge benefit of course - with this kind of team you can work on a project like this effectively because they're genuinely interested in inventing something new and not just repeating and improving on things that already exist. So we took a team and set it apart from the regular development process. And we gave them the opportunity to think freely about BMW and about the Group. I would say that this kind of thing is fairly rare in the automotive industry. Of course, this makes it something of a risk, too, but I think you have to adopt this kind of strategy to be able to say we think we can go further than others and we're going to demonstrate that we're capable of describing the future quickly and effectively. I would say the automobile has been reinvented, so to speak. This is because of the materials and the technologies we're using. The vehicle is different in the sense that vehicle production has been entirely revolutionised as compared to plants where automobiles made of steel are built as they are today. There is a very stable trend towards sustainability across the entire process chain. We think these are things that have not been addressed in the automotive sector yet - things that will be of interest to customers in the future. It involves a completely new approach - we basing everything on the idea of sustainability, from raw materials and development right through to production, upcycling, recycling and re-use. We had colleagues from a whole range of departments visiting big cities back in 2007 - megacities in Asia, the USA and Europe. They started bringing back information from urban planners and mayors about what's going on in cities to improve the traffic situation or the air quality, for example. These were the first points of reference we had. Our team sat down to take a look at this and then we went a step further and ran a much more specific customer study where we actually lived with people in big cities in some cases, travelling with them to work in their vehicles and asking them: "What kind of improvements would you like to see in your city? Or what kind of things would you like to see in terms of your travel to work and back home again." We deliberately didn't ask people: what will the car of the future look like? That approach very rarely works. All you have to find out is what kind of improvements people would like to see, what would make life easier. We then took all these impressions and sat down together in our small team with our designers in particular, and we said: how could you pare all this down to a few points so that everybody understands what a megacity vehicle is? Customers expect a megacity vehicle to be something which is a sort of a sofa, a table and a big flatscreen. This was the insight we gained from travelling with potential customers from their apartment to work and back again. One thing they said was that if they were stuck in traffic, they would like to be able to get to their briefcase, take out their laptop and put it on a tabl