Vehicle fleet · Automotive asset
BMW FLEET
Munich is the heart of Bavaria, and Bavaria, naturally, is BMW country. Its business world, however, prefers its money quiet. The genuinely established Bavarian firm arrives in something sensible and rather enjoys being underestimated for it. Which is precisely what makes a row of immaculate black BMWs outside a Munich office so informative. It is not the local code. It is the local code as imagined by somebody who has studied it from a distance and would like credit for the homework.
Corporate theatre
Cars, after all, are wonderfully efficient pieces of corporate theatre. They say a great deal before anybody has had to produce a balance sheet, explain a business model or answer an inconvenient question. One large black BMW says stability. Several say success. A whole fleet begins to suggest that somebody, somewhere, must be doing extremely well indeed.
Our protagonists were, of course, no exception. Whatever else may be said about them, and a great deal will be, presentation was the one discipline they had genuinely mastered. They were champions of it, and the rest of the field was never quite in sight. And in their reading of Munich there was no better way to complete the picture than with the appropriate machinery: large, black, polished, expensive and unmistakably Bavarian.
There is, however, a rather interesting story behind these cars. Not the sort of story that fits in a caption, and not one worth spoiling with a few premature sentences. It deserves to be laid out properly, in the right order, with the paperwork on the table and enough room for the reader to appreciate the smaller curiosities along the way.
We shall get to it very soon.
Aren't they beautiful?
