BMW’s slogan is “The Ultimate Driving Machine.” It was written in 1974 by
Martin Puris, it was created for the American market rather than the German one, and it has
survived one serious attempt by BMW itself to replace it.
This page sets out where the line came from, using BMW’s own account of it, and then shows
what happened next using something less usual: the brochures BMW printed at the time, which are
in this archive and can be read directly.
1974: an American slogan for a German car
BMW’s own history of its North American company credits the line to Martin Puris of the
agency Ammirati, Puris, AvRutnick — renamed Ammirati & Puris after a founding partner
left in 1977 — which had recently spun off from Young & Rubicam. The tagline was first
shown to BMW executives in a mock print advertisement during the agency’s pitch, and Puris’s
recollection of the reaction is short: “They loved it! I think we were the only agency that
understood the car BMW built.”
What the agency understood was a positioning decision rather than a phrase. In Puris’s
account of the strategy: “It’s the only thing that makes an expensive car worth the money…
We never said luxury car.” That is the whole idea. Every competitor in the segment was selling
comfort, status and equipment; BMW sold the act of driving, and priced it accordingly.
The results BMW publishes are unambiguous. United States sales went from 15,007 cars in 1974
to 19,419 in 1975 and 26,040 in 1976. By the mid-1980s BMW was selling close to 100,000 cars a
year in America. Tom McGurn, then BMW’s public relations manager, described the advertising in
one line: “Their ads compared driving a BMW versus traveling on a sofa — really
spot-on.”
What the brochures show
The oldest document in this archive carrying the slogan is the
1987 3 Series Convertible brochure, and
it carries it in the least glamorous place possible — the small print of the back page,
after the copyright notice and the words “Printed in West Germany.” The line was by then simply
what BMW signed its documents with.
From there it runs continuously. Counting only United States market brochures, the phrase
appears in 83 documents in this archive across the years 1987 to 2019, and in the 2010s it is in
almost every one: nine brochures for the 2010 model year, twelve for 2011, fourteen each for
2012 and 2013.
Those numbers matter because of what BMW was doing in its advertising at exactly that
moment.
2010: the year BMW dropped it
In February 2010, during the Vancouver Winter Olympics, BMW of North America replaced the
tagline with a new one: “Joy is BMW.”
BMW’s own account gives two reasons. After the 2008 financial crisis, BMW AG wanted its
advertising consolidated — “one campaign for the world” — rather than a different
line in every market. And there was a perception problem the company wanted to solve. Jack
Pitney, then vice president of marketing, put it plainly: “people have a very good opinion of the
brand from a technical competence standpoint, but they equate BMW drivers with aggression and
arrogance.”
The reaction was not what BMW expected. The campaign drew heavy criticism from existing
owners and the motoring press; the critic Peter DeLorenzo wrote that “you don’t just walk away
from one of the most memorable and accurately descriptive advertising themes in automotive
history.” BMW’s own retrospective records that some customers sent Pitney death threats.
The retreat, visible in a printed document
Here the archive shows something the advertising history does not, because printed material
moves more slowly than a campaign does.
Open the 2011 full-line brochure — the
catalogue covering the whole range — and both slogans are on it at once. The cover carries
“The Ultimate Driving Machine” in its usual place, and immediately below it the campaign line:
“JOY CAN BE COUNTED. joy is bmw. joy is the heart and soul of every ultimate driving
machine.®”
That sentence is a merger, not a replacement. Rather than choosing, BMW subordinated the new
line to the old one and made “joy” a property of the Ultimate Driving Machine. In our archive,
the capitalised campaign wording appears in one brochure for the 2010 model year, twelve for
2011 and four for 2012 — while the original tagline appears in nine, twelve and fourteen
across the same three years. The two ran side by side, and then one of them stopped.
By early 2011 the advertising had followed: BMW’s Super Bowl commercial that year led with
“The Ultimate Driving Machine” and dropped “Joy” altogether. The campaign had lasted about a
year.
Is it still the slogan?
Yes. The most recent document in this archive, the
2019 full-line brochure, still uses it as a
description rather than a footer — “quad M tailpipes let everyone know this Ultimate
Driving Machine® means business” — which is a slogan doing the job of an adjective, and
a sign of how thoroughly it has settled in.
Note the registered trademark symbol. In BMW’s American material the phrase is a registered
mark and is printed with the ® almost every time, which is why it appears that way in the
quotations above.
Common questions
What is BMW’s slogan?
“The Ultimate Driving Machine,” in the United States and increasingly worldwide. It has been
in continuous use since 1974, apart from a roughly one-year interruption in 2010–2011.
Who wrote “The Ultimate Driving Machine”?
Martin Puris, in 1974, at the agency Ammirati, Puris, AvRutnick. BMW’s own fiftieth
anniversary history of its North American company credits him directly.
What is BMW’s slogan in Germany?
“Freude am Fahren” — literally “joy in driving,” and rendered in English-language
European material as “Sheer Driving Pleasure.” It is not a translation of the American line;
the two were written separately for different markets.
This is a practical detail as well as a historical one. The phrase is one of the markers we
use to tell a European brochure from an American one, and any brochure in this archive printed
for a European market is labelled as such for exactly that reason:
the engines, equipment and units in it are not the American ones.
Why did BMW change its slogan to “Joy”?
To unify its advertising worldwide after the 2008 financial crisis, and to soften a brand
image BMW’s own marketing leadership described as being associated with “aggression and
arrogance.” The change lasted about a year.
What does BMW stand for?
Bayerische Motoren Werke — Bavarian Motor Works. That is a separate question from the
slogan and we cover it in full, including what the roundel does and does not depict, in
what does BMW stand for and in the
history of the BMW logo.
Sources
- BMW Group PressClub, BMW NA 50th Anniversary | 50 Stories for 50 Years, Chapter 6:
“The Ultimate Ad Slogan: BMW becomes the Ultimate Driving Machine” — the 1974 origin, the agency, the quotations from Martin Puris and Tom McGurn, and the sales figures. - BMW Group PressClub, same series, Chapter 34:
“Joy is BMW: BMW brand advertising goes global” — the 2010 campaign, the reasoning, the reaction and the return. - The brochures quoted above, all published in full in this archive: the
1987 3 Series Convertible, the
2011 full-line and the
2019 full-line. The counts by model year are from
the recognised text of all 188 United States market documents we hold.