No trip to Munich would be complete without a visit to BMW’s Museum. Located in what appears to be a bowl, just adjacent to the four cylinder building, the Museum houses artifacts and information on the history of BMW. This isn’t a chronological display but rather a grouping of displays broken up by theme.
The items are well placed and as accessible to visitors as possible (and items are often within touching distance, with minimal barriers between the object and the visitor, but please don’t touch).
You can spend several hours moving through the various displays and some of the highlights are the selection of engines, the pre-war cars, the fabulous Mille Miglia cars, record braking motorcycles and, when I visited, the art cars.
The art cars are pretty special and worth the effort to see when they’re all in one place. Of the bunch, the Jeff Koons car impressed me the most. It captured the essence of speed. Nice that it was raced at Le Mans.
Knowing some BMW history beforehand is helpful when viewing the displays (though they all are accompanied by placards with information in German and English). Having an historical understanding of BMW helps tie everything together. And, the gift shop, for some reason, happens to have a good selection of books on BMW.
