Video: A work day for BMW's "Energy Minister"
Here's a video from DeutscheWelle, a German TV station, showing a typical working day for Johannes Liebl, Head Engineer at BMW, responsible of Energy management.
The video starts with Herr Liebl driving a BMW 118d to work and shows how the Start/Stop technology works smoothly when he stops at a traffic light and commenting how much fuel is not wasted because of this practise. He drives a different car every day for testing purposes, the same way a customer performs a test drive.
When he arrives at BMWs headquarters, the parking lot shows a full collection of BMW models and the camera follows him as he leads a meeting. The central question he asks and for which he's got only a partial answer is which technology is the best to protect the environment: hybrid? electric? natural gas? BMW's policy of offering a sport drive must not be unrelated to polluting less.
The video also shows a workshop where some hybrids prototypes and their batteries different devices are tested (such as regenerative braking), where questions (which lots of customers ask) are presented: are the batteries reliable? will my car start tomorrow? Then BMW shows its wind tunnel, and speaks that they have spent 250 million EUR in R+D to reduce CO2 emissions.
The video contains more information (my German isn't that great) but Herr Liebl comes back home with a Mini Cooper. Not a bad job, eh?
[Source: YouTube]
[Edited: Vielen Danke to Jan for the tips - I guess I have to go back to German class]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jan 10:07AM (9/17/2007)
Hi,
I am from Germany and just watched the video.
You missunderstood a little bit when they started showing the garage. The blue 3series is not a hybrid (or at least they don't mention it), but rather a test vehicle. They are actually talking about ways to conserve the produced heat from the engine but also from the breaks. The main idea behind this effort is to have an engine in the morning that is still warm from the day before and thus saving energy.
The 250 Million € are not the cost for the wind tunnel but are actually the amount of money BMW has to spend to cut CO2 emmision by 1 %.
I hope that helps,
Jan
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