BMW’s Italian Designers Part 4

By Jackie Jouret
Photos courtesy The BMW Archive

As we saw in the first three installments of this series, BMW had fostered an association with Touring of Milan before World War II put an end to civilian automotive activities in 1941. That association had resulted in the Superleggera coupe that won the 1940 Mille Miglia, a pair of roadsters for which Touring crafted the bodywork to a design by BMW’s Wilhelm Meyerhuber, and a trio of stunning roadsters created for the proposed Berlin-Rome race.

One might have expected the Touring-BMW partnership to have resumed after the war, given the competitive and aesthetic success of those automobiles, but it did not. When BMW began building cars again in 1951, the company turned instead to Stabilimenti Farina for the external proposal that would be weighed against an in-house design for the 501 sedan.

With its traditional automobile factory in Eisenach lost to the Soviets, BMW was forced to restart production in Munich, in a plant that had built aero engines and motorcycles but never cars. The plant had taken a number of direct hits from Allied bombers, and it lacked the equipment or the capacity for large-scale production. Instead, its executives followed a “premium” strategy that would allow BMW to build a smaller number of higher-priced, higher-profit cars while it ramped up its production facilities.

BMW sales chief Hanns Grewenig knew that good design was essential if these high-end automobiles were to attract Germany’s most discerning customers. Alas, BMW didn’t have a styling department of its own, having dissolved its Artistic Design department during the war and also having declined to re-hire design chief Wilhelm Meyerhuber as the company regrouped following the end of hostilities.

Absent Meyerhuber, Grewenig sought fresh suggestions for a postwar BMW in Turin, Italy. According to BMW historian Horst Mönnich, Grewenig commissioned proposals from Stabilimenti Farina and Giovanni Michelotti, who’d started his career at Farina but had worked independently since 1946. Monnich says Michelotti’s proposal was “immediately rejected,” but BMW Design’s David Carp—who created and maintains the BMW Design Archive—says he’s never seen evidence of Michelotti’s work on this car. The presumably definitive chronicle of Michelotti’s career fails to mention it, which confirms Carp’s suspicion that Michelotti was never involved with the project.

Farina’s—likely drawn by Sergio Farina rather than his father Battista—was intriguing enough to warrant a full-scale, driveable prototype, but this too was rejected by the BMW board. As Monnich states, “There was nothing in it that suggested a BMW, which is what the customer wanted, and nothing in it, even in passing, that continued the old line.”

That assessment seems unduly harsh even when one considers that the car was similar to Farina’s bodywork for the Alfa Romeo 1900 Berlina. A photo of the prototype from the BMW Archive (seen here) shows a rather handsome automobile that combines modern lines with BMW’s signature double-kidney grille. Had it gone into production, it might well have inaugurated a new design direction for BMW, and it might have sold rather well.

Instead, however, BMW rejected both Italian options for a design created in-house by Peter Szymanowski, a longtime BMW employee who’d been head of body production at the Eisenach plant from 1938 to ’45, and who rejoined the company in 1948. He was 51 years old, and he was again responsible for body development. Within the BMW organizational chart, that meant he was also in charge of design.

The BMW board gave Symanowski free rein, and his design for the 501 certainly “continued the old line”—further back than might have been wise. As built, the 501 (and its identical but V8-powered stablemate, the 502) looks older than the 332 sedan designed by Meyerhuber in 1941, not to mention the Farina prorototype of 1951. “I think the 501 was allowed to look ‘old’ because of the target top-model Mercedes, which did not look very modern,” Carp says. Moreover, “BMW was apparently very concerned that nobody would recognize a BMW if it didn’t recall the glory days of the 1930s. In fact, Dr. Bernd Spiegel’s market study in the mid-’60s confirmed that most people still thought of the 327 and 328 when they thought of BMW.”

With styling that recalled those cars as well as the BMW sedans of the 1930s, Symanowski’s “Baroque Angel” was not a huge success, though part of the problem lay with its relatively underpowered six-cylinder engine and extraordinarily high price. Introducing a V8-powered version (the 502 and 3200, generally speaking) cured the performance problem, but made the car even more expensive.

Would the 501 have fared better with an Italian design? Perhaps. Szymanowski’s car was more than just old fashioned; it was also preposterously complicated to produce, so much so that Baur had to build the bodywork in Stuttgart until BMW could perfect its stamping methods to accommodate Szymanowski’s design. As one might surmise, that made it expensive to build, and raised the cost to consumers when most Germans could barely afford a motorcycle. “Production expert Szymanowski should have known better than to design surfaces which could only be produced at a very high cost, with lots of rejects, waste, and hand finishing,” Carp says. “The car was born to have a bad business case from every angle.”

If Stabilimenti Farina’s car could have been built more cost-effectively and sold for a lower price, it might well have given BMW the mainstream success it really needed in the 1950s. Though the 501 and its variants remained in production from 1952 to 1963, only 21,807 examples were built. That’s roughly the same number of Alfa 1900 Berlinas built from 1950 to ’59, by the way, but that car was only one model within a far broader range than BMW had to offer.

Both the Farina prototype and the production 501 can be seen here. Feel free to weigh in with your own opinions on the relative virtues of each design, and whether you think Pininfarina’s prototype might have had more appeal than the car BMW actually built. In our next installment, we’ll look at a pair of Michelotti prototypes for a long-wheelbase version of the same sedan.