If a request for you to explain how you would identify it was by visually a BMW, we are convinced that we will say you would be looking at the front of the car, and by identifying their classics kidneys. The BMW will tend to enjoy other features of design very well-defined, a front elongated, a-line very marked, but none of them are as unmistakable as the kidneys. But we did meet up with other details that are present for nothing more and nothing less than 55 years, and that today we see in any model, such as the BMW 3 Series, or the BMW 6-Series (with body Gran Coupe) of the photo that illustrates this post. And that is where the time comes to talk about the famous fold Hofmeister. But what is the fold Hofmeister and why it’s still there?
The fold Hofmeister is the widening of the rear pillar that occurs in almost all the BMW cast since 1961, smoothing out the peak rear and bottom of the dial side.
The fold Hofmeister is the angle that we see on the rear pillar of the BMW, which makes the pillar stretching forward and backward, so that the angle formed by the abutment with the shoulder line of the car is smooth, and does not end in a vertex-pointed.
This ridge began to be used in 1961, and although it might contribute to improving some facets techniques, such as structural rigidity and offer more support to the pillars that support the roof, in reality BMW has preserved this key design, which received the name of fold Hofmeister in honor of the designer of BMW who introduced you to the BMW 3200 CS-1961, for aesthetics.
BMW continues to recognize the fold Hofmeister as a sign of identity that emphasizes the architecture of your automobile, its rear-wheel-drive.
But it is still more curious that the story how was born the BMW 3200 CS, and how she was able to get the curve Hofmeister BMW. Evil tongues say that BMW realized that the body coupe Lancia Flaminia fit perfectly in the chassis of the BMW 3200L sedan, and that someone suggested, even, to take the opportunity for that body of Pininfarina, with a few kidneys on the front, fit in a new product from BMW. But in the German mark, far from re-use of a design that Lancia was already using, you have opted for the strategy not the least interesting of to commission Bertone to design a body-type coupé to the BMW 3200S.
And this is how it was going to be the BMW 3200 CS, and perhaps also how you got the crease Hofmeister to BMW, as that famous curve, which today we recognize in most BMW’s manufactured since then, he had already left to see in some models of Lancia, as the Flaminia. A fold thanks to which, among other things, the BMW 3200 CS was a rear pillar wide enough to fit the emblem of BMW.
Source: BMW
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