Driven: Inside BMW, the Most Admired Car Company in the World Book

If you can manage to get through the first 50 or so dreadful pages which are entirely about how brilliant BMWs are, its not a bad book.

It does cover a lot of interesting history about the company, the very private owners (the Quandt family), the Rover group purchase debacle, Rolls-Royce purchase, creating a new Mini, senior management in-fighting, its all here. If you like BMWs, you will learn a lot.

What is not so good, the book is presumably written my an American and is most likely targeted at an American audience, nothing wrong with that, but the history is biased towards BMW selling into the US, rather than an unbiased history covering all territories. The narrative seems to jump around more than necessary rather than follow a clear timeline of events. As the book was released in 2004, the latest cars discussed are clearly pretty old now, this would not be such a problem if the book ends with the what was then latest 2004 models, but as they are discussed heavily in the first 50 "marketing" pages, it does age the book. The final chapter covers hydrogen and how this is the future fuel for BMW (and all) cars which (by now) we should all be driving. Whilst this clearly has not taken off, it was an interesting subject to have included.

Final point, the author keeps referring wrongly to the BMW logo representing a propeller. It is not, it is intended to represent the Bavarian flag, the propeller tie-in with the badge was only used in some early advertising.