2011 BMW EUROSTYLE TOUR
IT’S AN INTERESTING EXPERIENCE having 11 Russians on a media trip with you. They come with extreme youth, flexible timekeeping, flash hairdos, cast-iron livers and a translator who manages, with only a three-second lag, to paraphrase all key conversations and interviews. It was mildly disconcerting hearing it though, because there was this constant foreign echo like being connected to a crossed transSiberian party line. We looked at each other curiously. There we were, the SA contingency, well into our Rainbow Nation thing, and armed with two beautiful young women, one of whom was Zulu and the other Xhosa. They dressed stylishly and wore designer shoes. One of them had real, natural braids and solemnly told us of her nervousness about walking in downtown Johannesburg on account of ‘hair-jackers’. Hairjackers? You can’t accuse SA of lacking microenterprise initiative, legal or not. We had living, breathing street cred, our group. The Russians weren’t quite sure what to make of us, nor we of them. Take Sergei (30 years old, if he’s a day), who spoke perfect English and owns not one, but two apartments in Moscow – one inherited from his parents and the other he had bought and rented out. Emerging? Perhaps more previously advantaged and now very emerged. There seem to be a lot more Sergeis about. The Russian market represents a sizeable chunk of what’s good on BMW’s global bottom line and what these journalists write filter back to a market that can’t get enough of the 5 and 7 Series, and anything with an X in its numbering. Russia’s millionaires and billionaires are also ‘on a Rolls’, so to speak, with perhaps their children responsible for the 100 percent growth in the Mini market. They’re not the only cherry in the economy for the company. At the 2011 IAA Motorshow, Richard Carter – Rolls-Royce director of global communications – offered a fascinating snapshot of this market. If you’re sick of the very word ‘recession’, because it affects you daily, you may be a tad dismayed to know that it’s just a rumour in some circles. Rolls-Royce has just celebrated another record year of sales, driven by a distinctly dragonish, rather than bullish market. Sales in China were up a staggering 57 percent in 2010, but have slowed to a modest 40 percent this year. Other industries should be so lucky. Carter deftly slices the Rolls market into the drivers and the driven with the Ghost very much a handson-the-wheel luxury car and the Phantom the choice of the Mr Big. This sector of the Chinese
elite ‘static test drive’ their Rollers by bundling the chauffeur up front and then slipping into the back seat, shutting the door with an almost imperceptible thunk and emerging 15 minutes later, inscrutable but impressed enough to sign on the dotted line. Danish brand guru Martin Lindstrom is big on selling consumer goods via the five senses, a kind of a 3D, surround-sound experience. Perhaps this Chinese version of the ‘five-sense experience’ meant that the potential buyer sat transfixed at the finishes, played with the gadgets, inhaled the ‘new car’ smell and, in the absence of any engine sound, hummed a little Mandarin version of ‘vroom-vroom’. As for taste – one hoped it was strictly metaphorical. Like the French expression for window shopping, lèche-vitrine (meaning to ‘lick the windows’). The IAA show itself was a visual orgy of concept cars for anyone curious about what 2013 will bring. It was pit stop one on the BMW Eurostyle Tour and, for our group, the motor manufacturing industry version of getting golden circle tickets at a rock concert. Here it meant track-side seats at the premiere and exposure to Bavarian machinery, Mini Cooper and RollsRoyce at their most avant garde. We expected eco savvy from the new generation BMWs and the Mini E, but what was also showcased at this year’s show was something of a surprise – the Rolls-Royce Phantom 102 EX. It was a curious thought, a Rolls-Royce driver gnawing anxiously at his lip about zero emissions, but it seems that there’s a luxury market that isn’t all rock stars, sheikhdom and old-fashioned landed gentry. Three models were revealed at the show that chairman of the BMW board Dr Norbert Reithofer said captured ‘the spirit of the time as well as the world in which we want to live tomorrow’. One was the BMW i3 Concept, a fully electric vehicle cloaked in some seriously green credentials and designed for metropolitan mobility. It’s now not enough to be emission-free. The vehicle should also be made of revolutionary materials and production itself must be sustainable. BMW also dangled, in front of the over 13 000 journalists and 850 000 visitors to the show, a tempting i8 sports car, a plug-in hybrid model that’s a combination of minimal fuel consumption and maximum driving pleasure dressed in aluminium and carbon fibre (made at a plant where, naturally, only hydroelectric power is used). It looked more like a racetrack star than a roadster in design and has to be the equivalent of guilt-free chocolate ganache; all the
Opposite: The light fantastic, courtesy of Ingo Maurer GmbH, winner of the Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany. This page, top: Haak and Hopfner’s micro-compact home, an incredible 2,6m cubed. It’s location adds to the fairy-tale look, perfectly in sync with its surroundings. Inside, clever lighting with the latest materials enhanced the decor
Above: Ruth Gurvich’s delicate design sensibilities are captured in a contemporary style. These geometric paper models are impressive enough on their own; then they’re reinterpreted in luminous white porcelain
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