CarBrandLogos archive · BMW · 1929

BMW3/15

BMW's first car was an Austin, built under licence in Thuringia.

Photo: Hunini · CC BY-SA 3.0

The story

A defining chapter in BMW history.

Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the BMW 3/15, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.

Origins

BMW did not design its first car. In 1928 it bought Fahrzeugfabrik Eisenach, a Thuringian firm that had been assembling the Austin Seven under licence from Herbert Austin since 1927 and selling it as the Dixi. The purchase brought BMW a factory, a dealer network and a product, all at once.

BMW Dixi 1930 · User ChiemseeMan on de.wikipedia · Public domain

Design and engineering

The car was renamed the BMW 3/15 DA-2 in 1929 — three taxable horsepower, fifteen actual ones, from a 749 cc side-valve four. It was tiny, cheap and almost entirely British in conception, down to the quarter-elliptic springs and the cable brakes that BMW soon replaced with a mechanical system acting on all four wheels.

Dixi 3-15 DA · LSDSL · CC BY-SA 2.0 de

In production

What mattered was volume. Around 25,000 were built in various forms before production ended in 1932, at a moment when Germany's motor industry was contracting sharply, and the money and the manufacturing experience carried BMW into designing cars of its own. The 3/20 that followed in 1932 was the first BMW car not derived from an Austin, and the 303 of 1933 introduced both the straight-six and the kidney grille.