Photo: BMW
In a nondescript industrial building in suburban Detroit, a $50,000 BMW is lying in pieces. The place looks like an illegal chop shop, where stolen vehicles are disassembled to be sold as parts. The body is on the floor, the chassis propped on a stand, the powertrain spread out in tiny bits on a table, the seats on somebody's desk.
But A. Sandy Munro is no car thief: he paid full price for the BMW i3 he subsequently tore apart. Nor is he selling it for parts. He is, however, selling information about this remarkable car to anyone who is interested. And rest assured, a lot of people in the auto industry want to know its secrets.
"This is, without a question of a doubt, the most advanced vehicle on the planet," said Munro, chief executive of Munro & Associates, whose firm specializes in reverse engineering for the auto industry among others. "It's as revolutionary as the Model T was when it came out."
The quirky-looking i3 is an urban electric car developed by BMW to cope with a confluence of troubling trends -- global congestion, pollution and, yes, high fuel costs -- that threaten the long-term viability of the automotive industry. "It’s entirely possible that we could see certain cities blocked for cars with internal combustion engines,” Ludwig Willisch, chief executive of BMW North America, told me a few years ago, when the i3 was still under development. It went on sale in the U.S. last May and BMW sold about 6,000 of them in 2014. Since then, of course, gasoline prices have fallen dramatically, making a massive shift toward electric cars unlikely any time soon.
Still, the i3 -- the first mass-market vehicle made of carbon fiber reinforced plastic for reduced weight and improved driving range – is full of innovative lessons for carmakers facing decisions about how to comply with tough new laws on emissions and fuel economy.
That's why Munro last August embarked on a deep-dive "tear-down" of the car at his company's benchmarking facility outside Detroit. The goal is to offer competitors an in-depth look at BMW's engineering secrets -- along with a detailed analysis of the costs and processes involved, right down to the individual nuts and bolts used. "This is Grandma's real cookbook," says Munro. "Everything is exposed; there is absolutely nothing left to the imagination with this kind of costing."
During a walk-around with Forbes, Munro demonstrated some of the i3's key innovations, including a carbon fiber "life module" with the crash protection of a Formula One race car that is glued and screwed to a rolling aluminum chassis module that includes the car's suspension, battery and drive system. The superior strength of the life module comes from the way the plastic fibers are aligned within the shell to resist crushing.
BMW's battery is also unique compared to other electric vehicles. The 360-volt battery consists of eight independently controlled modules, each containing 12 cells. The advantage of BMW's system is that when one cells goes bad, that module can be replaced, unlike in other EVs, like the Ford C-Max, which requires replacement of the entire battery pack, potentially costing thousands of dollars.
Munro is still crunching the numbers, but is convinced that despite the high cost of carbon fiber and lithium-ion batteries, BMW has designed the i3 to be profitable at a volume of about 20,000 vehicles a year. Given the regulatory challenges the industry faces, he said, "Other carmakers are going to be dragged up to the chalkboard and told, 'Do this'."
Carmakers frequently perform competitive tear-downs as part of their own internal benchmarking. (Often, in fact, they hire Munro's firm to do the proprietary work for them.) In this case, however, Munro decided to study the i3 at his own expense (about $1 million), and make his findings available for general distribution -- for a handsome price, of course (about $500,000 for carmakers). Customized reports on key vehicle systems, such as the body, rolling chassis, battery and heat exchange, powertrain and interior, will also be available to suppliers and others.
"We're not just selling this to car companies. Airplane companies, high-speed rail companies, even people making furniture are interested in this car because it's that revolutionary," said Munro. The most intense interest, though, is coming from Chinese carmakers, most of which have been dependent until now on technology from their joint venture partners. Munro says he's been talking to at least a dozen Chinese manufacturers concerned about future innovation when those partnerships run out.
A closer look at the teardown is here.
