Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Spy Shot

This is an older shot taken when our friends Art & Mo were in town. What you see here is the next generation BMW 6-Series car in prototype "test mule" configuration with camouflage paint. I know this because (1.) I'm a car geek and (2.) BMW's camouflage paint job is very distinctive, and it is used on all of their models-- if you get all the car magazines, you'll see this swirly job time and again, like here and here and here. The swirls are supposed to defeat cameras from getting details of the exact angles and final styling. The funny thing is that this picture was taken only a couple hundred feet from where I took this photo of a Porsche prototype in December 2008, and a few blocks from where I took a photo of a prototype of the next Mini (look for that soon). Nuremberg does have a history of vehicle manufacturing (some Volkswagen production occurred here in the 1940's, and Nuremberg was the home to no less than 6 motorcycle manufacturers after WWII), but as to why we seem to get a lot of car prototypes here-- BMW's Munich HQ is 90 minutes to the south and Porsche's home base of Stuttgart is 3 hours to the west-- is anybody's guess.

3 comments:

cliff1976 said...

Component suppliers need prototypes, too!

Unknown said...

If that's a 6 series, why is there a B pillar ad the midpoint? It can't be fake, the front and back windows are WAY TOO long for that to be a coupe!

The Accidental Expat said...

David: Thanks for reading! I'm far from being a BMW expert, but it looked too big to be a 5-Series. Besides, there will be a 6-Series Sedan in 2012-- see here: http://www.leftlanenews.com/bmw-gran-coupe-to-wear-6-series-badge.html