Don't sit on your innovation hands

David Turney - Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Was riding with a friend just this weekend in his new BMW M3 coupe.

Very sweet car indeed. Nimble, mid-size chassis. All alloy 4 liter V8 with 420 horsepower and a six-speed manual (the way it was intended). Zero to 100 in 4.5 seconds, give or take. Apart from the bonnet bulge and the dinner-plate brake discs, it’s not too ostentatious.

What makes the M even more sweet is that a standard 3 series coupe (on which the M3 is based) is had with either a 4 or 6 and is as quiet and safe as your grandparents need it to be.

As we’re winding up in this exceptional piece of automotive engineering, I couldn’t help but reveal to my friend that this sweet piece of German 4-wheeled fun owed a thank you note to a distant, unlikely relative, the Pontiac GTO.

See, back in the early sixties, the then chief of Pontiac (John Z. DeLorean) hypothesised the concept of putting their big car engines into their mid-size model range, thus creating the muscle car category. The first muscle car was the 1964 Pontiac GTO and the wider Pontiac brand became a lightning rod for driving excitement.

The M3 is the exact same concept (though granted, far more technologically evolved); take the mid-size body, remove the grocery-getting engine and put in the bigger, more powerful one from the range. Instant power to weight equals instant length of smile.

Pontiac died not long ago, and while there were plenty of business factors that forced this, the brand had been on life support for years before. It’d lost its value and its distinctive positioning, one that had been accelerated (pun intended) years before by dropping a mountain motor in a mid-size. This was an innovation that shifted the direction of an entire industry and Pontiac, for a long time owned it. Unfortunately, they failed to keep it up and they let the competition catch up and ultimately overtake them.

Here at Smart Automotive, we're always looking at innovations and we're set to release a new product that takes the concept of recycled protection in a whole new direction.

In the meantime though, our current products are innovative in design and available now, so check them out in our catalogue and see how our solutions can help your own competitive distinction as an automotive professional.

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