The history of BMW’s iconic ‘Ultimate Driving Machine’ slogan

There are few taglines in the automotive industry that work as well as BMW’s. When you think of what the brand and its most legendary cars stand for, ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’ perfectly encapsulates it. Now 50 years old, it’s a tagline that has stood the test of time, too.

It was while doing some research for our Classic TV series that I stumbled across one of the commercials that defined my own childhood. Perhaps accidentally doxing myself here as the youngest on the editorial team, it was the 2006 commercial for the E90 3 Series sedan.

Filmed at Sydney Motorsport Park, then known as Eastern Creek Raceway, the ad encapsulates the evolution of BMW’s top-selling sedan from the 2002 launched back in 1968 all the way through to the then-new 3er.

Soundtracked by the BodyRockers’ hit single “I Like the Way”, this commercial left its tagline firmly imprinted in my brain. ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’ said everything it needed to for me – if you like driving, a BMW is the car for it.

But of course, this commercial was just one of many to use the tagline, so I was curious to actually trace its origins back. After all, it was a recent revelation to me that Audi’s ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ tagline was originally penned for the NSU Ro80.

‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’ isn’t the first iconic tagline BMW has had, with 1965 seeing the German market start to use the tagline ‘Freude am Fahren’, translating to ‘sheer driving pleasure’. Pleasure – ‘Freude’, which also translates to joy or fun – was a word that had been a constant in its German advertising taglines since the 1930s.

The famous tagline has now been a constant across the brand’s advertising for 50 years

It was the US market we can thank for ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’, where in 1973, BMW was trying to break into the States the same way Volkswagen enviably had. Two advertising men – Ralph Ammirati and Martin Puris, trading simply as Ammirati & Puris – decided to ditch their jobs at Carl Ally Advertising to go it alone, moving to a hotel room in Manhattan and allowing four weeks to secure a paying advertising client.

Legendary auto exec Bob Lutz was the one to give the upstarts a shot, having seen their past work on campaigns for Fiat. BMW’s reach was limited in the US at the time, with few knowing just where the brand sat in the market. Rather than pitch it at country club members, however, the duo decided to aim it at their own generation.

Ammirati and Puris found their unique angle by spending time with BMW’s engineers in Munich, seeking to highlight how what’s under the skin makes the difference in a BMW

Heading to Munich to compete with other potential advertising clients – who all flew in first class while they sat in economy – the pair took an unusual approach by spending time not just with BMW’s marketing department, but its engineers as well. This time spent with those actually developing the cars led to the central message of the print commercial that kickstarted it all: “Our status symbol is under the hood, not on it.”

Obviously, they got the gig since you can see the 1974 commercial above. Curiously, beyond that first key message, they opted for long copy that encouraged active reading as well – something which remained a hallmark of BMW print advertising for years after.

However, the one message which truly stood the test of time – and indeed, was the only other sentence written on the first texta-sketched draft – was the iconic tagline below the BMW roundel.

The print advertising format remained the same for years, but the tagline was still the same, and those words would equally be the full stop at the end of the brand’s TV commercials to follow: ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’.

This was the original sketch for the advert by art director Clem McCarthy, who was hired by Ammirati & Puris for their new account with BMW, with the two key messages the only actual copy that was included