BMWNA Celebrates 50 Years By Looking Back At the 2002

It has been called the greatest automotive review of all time. However you rank it, “Turn Your Hymnals to 2002” by David E. Davis Jr. changed the automotive world in the U.S. and catapulted BMW of North America into the spotlight. It was so insightful that it even led to Davis being fired.
But we’ll get to that in a moment.
The year was 1968, and the car Davis was testing wasn’t the insane Turbo or even the Tii. Those models were still years away. This was simply the base model 2002, which perhaps made the way it drove all the more revolutionary to Davis and an entire generation of automotive enthusiasts.
A year earlier, the magazine had declared BMW’s 1600-2 “the best $2,500 sedan Car and Driver ever tested.” With the larger and more powerful 2.0-liter engine, the 2002 became, as Davis wrote, “most certainly the best $2,850 sedan in the whole cotton-picking world.”
This spotlight eventually turned one of the most obscure automotive brands imported into the U.S. into a household name. But at the time of publication, things were very different for BMW of North America (BMWNA). BMW hadn’t officially exported its cars to the U.S. prior to World War II, and only a few were imported by private customers. During the Occupation, American service members discovered sporty BMWs like the 328 and 327, but they didn’t bring enough of these cars home to make much of an impact. BMW’s postwar product strategy didn’t increase the marque’s visibility during the 1950s, nor did its disjointed distribution system. While Fred Oppenheimer’s Fadex Corporation had short-term success with the Isetta microcar, Max Hoffman failed to find an audience for BMW’s V8-powered 507 or any other models aimed at the American car buyer. The early-’60s Neue Klasse sedans and 2000 CS coupe also missed the mark. By 1966, BMW had sold just 1,253 cars in the United States.
All of that changed with the launch of the Type 114 (as it was known internally). Thanks in part to Car and Driver’s glowing assessment of the 1600-2, BMW’s U.S. sales nearly quadrupled in 1967, reaching a total of 4,564 cars. Interestingly, nearly all of these were 1600-2s, not the larger, more practical four-door models.
Still, BMW remained a bit of an enthusiast’s secret. However, with the April 1968 issue of Car and Driver, that all began to change. As one of the “Big Three” automotive publications, along with Road & Track and Motor Trend, Car and Driver had around one million subscribers and incredible power to influence readers—many of whom were likely tiring of the big American muscle car phenomenon.
But it wasn’t just the quality of Davis’s insights that made the review legendary. It was the way his prose transported readers to a time, a place, and a state of mind.
To give you an idea of the power of this review: it was this piece that ultimately sparked a grassroots movement that led to my father buying a 2002 in the early ’70s. That car, in turn, gave me the BMW bug when I was a small boy in the early ’80s. I can only imagine countless readers have similar stories. But enough about that—let’s dive into the review. Here are a few excerpts for you to judge for yourself:
As I sit here, fresh from the elegant embrace of BMW’s new 2002, it occurs to me that something between nine and ten million Americans are going to make a terrible mistake this year.
So far as I’m concerned, to hell with all of ‘em. If they’re content to remain in the automotive dark, let them. I know about the BMW 2002, and I suspect enthusiasts will buy as many as those pink-cheeked Bavarians in their leather pants and mountain-climbing shoes would like to build and ship over here. Something between nine and ten million squares will miss out on this neat little 2-door sedan with all the cojones and brio and elan of cars twice its size and four times its price, but some ten thousand keen types will buy them in 1968, so the majority loses for once.
Depress the clutch. Easy. Like there was no spring. Snick. First gear. Remove weight of left foot from clutch. Place weight of right foot on accelerator. The minute it starts moving, you know that Fangio and Moss and Tony Brooks and all those other big racing studs retired only because the feared that someday you’d have one of these, and when that day came, you’d be indomitable. They were right. You are indomitable.
David E Davis
As for David E. Davis Jr., “Turn Your Hymnals to 2002” cemented his reputation as one of America’s finest and most influential automotive journalists. Ironically, it also got him fired from Car and Driver, thanks to his complaint that the 2002’s radio—made by Car and Driver advertiser Blaupunkt—“couldn’t pick up a Manhattan station from the far end of the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Afterward, he took a job with the advertising agency Campbell-Ewald before returning to Car and Driver in 1976, this time as editor-in-chief. In that role, he wrote even more favorable reviews of BMW automobiles and moved Car and Driver headquarters from New York City to Ann Arbor, Michigan. There, Davis petitioned the city to renumber the magazine’s new office building as 2002 Hogback Road—slightly out of sequence on the street grid but a fitting homage to the car that made his career and put BMW on the radar of discerning American enthusiasts.
You can read the entire original review here. And for a full retrospective on David E. Davis (who passed away in 2011) head over to Car & Driver.