Day 1 - Mechanical Marvels

Our first stop is the BMW HQ - the four cylindrical towers constructed layer by layer from the top to the bottom using wire suspension. It was a splendid architecture.

We were first greeted by Corporate Affairs Mr Jean-Michel Juchet who gave us a 30min presentation on the past, present, and future of BMW. Most of it I believe can be read up on wiki.

However, a lot of the emphasis has been placed on the sustainability of their automobile production. In fact, sustainability is one of the most crucial components of their project proposals. This makes me wonder how do they stay competitive while advancing an economically unsustainable agenda.

The answer was given to us during lunch and it seems that most of the sustainability oriented projects, albeit costly now, are actually profitable in the long run. This perhaps hints at the idea that the first step to achieving world wide adoption of green technologies is to make these technologies cheap. But on the other hand it also raises the question of how much effort are the companies really putting into saving our environment.

Are they willing to forgo profit for the sake of our environment?

After lunch, we visit BMW Welt, which means BMW World in English. The architecture is once again eye-opening. The tornado symbolizes a revolutionary hurricane that brings elegant car design from the clouds back to earth.

A short introductory tour reveals that this building functions as both a customer experience and an exhibition facility. It is surprising that the exhibitions here are more interesting and more high-tech than those found in Singapore Science Centre.

We played around quite a bit before moving on to visit the manufacturing plant just across the road.

Once again, we were astonished by the precise movements and cooperation of robotic arms on the car assembly. We were sadly not allowed to take any photographs but the close substitute I can use to describe these mechanical marvels is probably those scenes in I, Robot and other science fiction movies.

We were told that the entire plant can produce 900 cars each day and every one of them has already been pre-ordered by a customer. You can imagine the astronomical figure of their gross profit.

And then comes the jaw dropping (literally) dinner at Wirtshaus in der Au. The servings are so humongous that we can literally eat until our jaws drop!

Hope I won't put on too much weight after the trip... haha