BMW

A complete marque study of BMW. Traces the company from Rapp Motorenwerke and the Treaty of Versailles that banned German aircraft manufacture, through Max Friz's 1923 R32 — whose boxer engine, longitudinal crankshaft and shaft drive are still in production a century later — to Ernst Henne's 1937 speed record that stood for fourteen years. Covers the Eisenach split that produced two rival companies building the same motorcycle, the Earles-fork /2 era, the R90S that won the first AMA Superbike championship, the R100RS and its wind-tunnel fairing, the GS revolution and four Paris-Dakar victories, the flying-brick heresy, and the last airhead. Includes live European market data on thirteen models and the finding that BMW tops our reliability table at 81, the highest of any marque.