Thanks Joe - coming from you that's quite the compliment. And I can suggest a place to rent bikes from.. if you were doing it camping like you usually do the cost isn't outrageous...
But to continue..
Sept 4th. Munich GE - Visiting the Mothership..
View from our Munich hotel balcony..
We had planned on this day being a no bike day - so the bikes remained parked in the hotel garage. If you're looking for bike stuff.. skip this. It's more about Munich and BMW in Munich and my bitching about BMW of North America, a bunch of dolts in NJ..
So far we'd seen several BMW plants around Germany. One of the biggest and original plants is located in the middle of downtown Munich. BMW is a very big deal in Munich - probably their leading corporate citizen. Besides the plant - the city is home to "BMW Welt" (aka BMW World) and the BMW Museum and the BMW office building for the corporate headquarters (the 4-Cylinder Building.)
If you plan to go - you can easily spend an entire day visiting the Welt and Museum. We spent most of a day.
We started out from our hotel via the subway (or underground in the UK), which had a station a very short distance from our hotel entrance. The subway charges by time and zone. You buy a ticket for an amount of time to travel within a certain radius of the center of the city. The zones are concentric - going outward to the suburbs. The charges appear to be set based on where you enter the system. We were in Zone#1 - and all of our travel in the city would be in Zone#1. If we'd wanted to go further out of the city center - we'd need a ticket for the zone that included where we wanted to go. Charges were quite reasonable - a few Euro for 10 hours ticket time.
Getting on the subway there is a machine in the car that stamps your ticket with the time you started travelling. There are no humans involved, and actually no checking that we could see, but supposedly if you were caught traveling without a ticket, or with an expired ticket, or out of the zone you bought for - the fines are hefty. Being Germany everyone seemed to just buy the ticket and stamp it when they got on their first train.
Interesting system that I can't see working anywhere in the US.
So - off we went.
The subway is of course - spotless:
As you pop out of the subway - this is the view across the street:
Entrance to BMW Welt:
BMW Welt is all the stuff BMW makes now. All the cars, bikes, Rolls-Royce - it's all there and except for the rollers you can molest all of them. What I found interesting is there was only one car there that I had even the slightest lust for.. and it of course isn't imported to the US. It's the 1-Series hatchback. Hatchbacks are BIG in Europe. Audi, Mercedes, every Japanese maker, every euro manufacturer seems to offer one. BMW's is one of the best looking of the bunch so of course BMW doesn't want to import it.
I-Series Hatch in Red:
BMW-NA believes in self-fulfilling prophesies.. Back many years ago they had another hatch that was considered a semi-hot hatch of the day.. It was based on the 3 series - the 318i Hatch. BMW prophesized that it wouldn't sell in the US, so they imported very few of them in the lowest possible trim level. They were right - since there weren't any available to buy in the US it didn't sell well. DUH. Since then they drag that up as an example why a hatch wouldn't sell in the USA.
Sometimes they are very dumb. I got to chatting to one of the product specialists who work in the Welt about the 1-Series hatch.. and said in an M guise it might actually get me out of my M-Coupe. He said they're coming out with a 325HP version of it in Europe with a twin-turbo 4. EXACTLY what would interest me. But - of course - BMW-NA knows it wouldn't sell here so they won't import it. And most hot-hatches from Japan have buyers lined up for them.
I think BMW-NA needs to get their heads out of their asses sometimes.. but I digress..
BMW is very big on electronic cars. Turns out Germany has some deal where they give people enough incentive money to make buying an electric car worthwhile, and then for the frosting on the cake - includes 10 years of free electricity to run it on.
I might not have mentioned it - but Germany now gets more than 1/3rd of it's power from renewable sources, primarily wind and solar. Almost every roof has solar panels on it, and the windmill farms are all over Germany, often simply located in the middle of farmer's fields. They shut off all their nuclear power plants after the Japanese disaster, and their intention is to move as much as they can as fast as they can to non-polluting renewable energy. Apparently part of that move is to make electric cars and vehicles (including motorcycles) replace a large part of the current internal combustion vehicles.
So - BMW - being sometimes smart - has a much larger range of electric vehicles in Europe than in the US (as best I know.. but I'm going on what I see at dealerships here..)
I-8 Electric Sports Car:
I(?) Series Electric:
We noticed that outside the Welt was a series of parking spaces specifically for electric vehicles - with charging ports - for free, and at the AutoBahn service centers there were usually 1-2 fast-charge parking spaces for electric cars.. all for free.
5-Series Touring
Another one BMW predicts won't sell.. so they're not bringing them to the US and guess what - they're right - they haven't sold a one. They're all over in Europe.. But - in the US the past two 5-series Tourings were brought over in tiny quantities so they only sold a few of them - every damn one they imported. In 2003 we bought one - of the 2 that were available on the entire east coast of the US. If they had imported last year there probably won't be a Lexus in my driveway - but BMW-NA knows they won't sell.
Motorcycles had their own level..
Apparently we were just a few weeks early to see the new watercooled R1200R bike (revealed this week.) And there was a nice coffee/lunch bar in the motorcycle section where we had lunch before heading over to the Museum.
To be continued in next posting as soon as I can - visiting the BMW museum..