BMW built its brand on superior performance, a characteristic that’s been put on cruise control in the People’s Republic of China, where the 5 Series Hybrid is the perfect compromise.
It took some precision engineering to create a slogan as vague as Bavarian Motor Works’ “Sheer Driving Pleasure” (纯粹驾驶乐趣). All cars should offer some sort of ‘driving pleasure’, so what’s different about BMW? Does the pleasure derive from efficiency, comfort, performance or a sense of adventure?
The qualifier ‘sheer’ tells us that whatever the pleasure is, anything that’s extraneous to it ought to have been shorn off, and yet the new BMW 5 series hybrid seems determined to do it all, more army knife in its multi-functionality than a Panzer of power and performance.
I arrived at the Shanghai BMW Experience Centre hoping to drive an X series, wondering what sort of four wheel drive community exists in a city that’s for the most part flat, paved, and congested. After laughing at the Chinese name on my driver’s license (山猫 or ‘Mountain Cat’, chosen when I was still living here a little ironically) my salesman, David, told me none of the sports utility vehicles on the lot had valid license plates. That doesn’t seem to stop many drivers in Shanghai but David was adamant. He suggested the 5 Series Hybrid instead.
The hybrid has an electric engine for economical driving (buyers get tax breaks and other incentives worth hundreds of thousands of renminbi), a petrol engine Sport Mode for experiencing a brief thrill between sets of traffic lights, and an overwhelming array of automatic settings for making driving effortless.
“Women who wear high heels love this feature” — David, Shanghai BMW Experience Centre salesman
Driving the wide, empty streets of what had been the site of Shanghai World Expo in 2010, he pointed out the hand break that engaged automatically when the car came to a stop and released when the accelerator was depressed. “Women who wear high heels love this feature”, he said.
The eight speed transmission is automatic too, because “manual transmissions are not popular in China.” He also explained how popular longer wheel bases are among BMW drivers in China, impeding the cars’ cornering abilities but giving passengers more room and smoothing out the ride.
BMW (宝马 or ‘Precious Horse’ in Chinese) has been incredibly successful in China, but not because it allows drivers to reenact race car driver fantasies, taking aggressive lines as they wend their way up mountain roads. The chief selling point of the sports utility X series is not its four-wheel drive capabilities but its taller cabin, which David says allows people to sit more upright and thus more comfortably.
Sheer Driving Pleasure isn’t the only slogan BMW uses in its global communications. There’s another, though it’s less prominent in China: The Ultimate Driving Machine. Given consumer preferences in the PRC, it could use a tweak. Shanghai’s elevated highways (高架) are not the autobahn and the ring road is hardly the Nürburgring. In Shanghai, BMW is The Ultimate Sitting Machine.
This article was originally posted on Flamingo’s online magazine Lens