The first BMW was a 1908 Puch motorcycle. But when BMW was founded in 1925, car production was in its infancy. Several car designers, including one of the company’s founders, Carl Ruckhoff, wrote car concepts before BMW itself did so, and BMW’s first design, the A1, was an outright rejection of the convention of car designs at that time. The first BMW car, the B8, was actually built in 1928 but did not go into production until 1932. It was an eight-cylinder 4-cylinder sedan, and it cost about $1,500. There were only 635 of them in the whole of Germany and 27 in Europe.
A typical BMW car today
Back then, Germany produced about 2,000 cars per day, and BMW was just beginning production. Nowadays, BMW builds about as many cars in a day as that initial BMW did in that early German year.
A typical BMW car today costs about $37,000 in the U.S. and 10 times as much in Germany. BMW uses the same basic architecture for all its cars.