Is BMW now expanding its business to construction vehicles, e.g. the manufacture of excavators? No, the cooperation with John Deere was handled by the now 100% owned BMW subsidiary Designworks. The company, which was originally only based in California, exists since 1972..

Since 1995, BMW has developed itself from the customer to the owner of the innovative company, which is by no means restricted to cars. Adriaan van Hooydonk, today's design director at BMW, was here boss for a time. Designworks is now situated in Asia and Munich, too.

Together with John Deere, it is about the vision of an excavator, which was called 'Fixstern' (fixed star). There are e.g. weight reductions, as always with newer vehicles, whereby 20 percent are an ambitious aim for the sometimes hard use of a construction machine.

In addition, the environmental impact was to be further reduced, but it was also about the workplace itself. What about the view on the work area, how spacious is the cabin and how can the important protection towards above be improved? And, of course, communication to the outside must not be neglected.

Training for the new excavator is using Augmented Reality. Outdoor communication is considered important, e.g. then later in practice to the construction supervisor. Also, a kind of telemetry to the workshop is possible to keep downtime as low as possible. Let us stay with the networking: the one with potential customers was taken very seriously in the development.

Also the people at John Deere seem to be enthusiastic about the collaboration (see the first video below). This is clear from the press release of the BMW Group: a Diesel hybrid drive, which is suspended from the chassis but has a lower center of gravity, longer wheelbase, two electrically steered axles for greater maneuverability, airless radial tires, a scoop made of weight-saving material. And all this at lower possible production costs. 03/17

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