507 and Z8

507 and Z8: Two Roadsters BMW Built at a Loss to Sell an Idea

Max Hoffman was not a BMW executive; he was the New York importer who, through the 1950s, had an outsized talent for telling struggling German and Austrian manufacturers exactly what an American buyer wanted before they had asked for it themselves. In 1954, Hoffman told BMW's management that there was an opening in the American sports-car market sitting squarely between the expensive, exotic Mercedes-Benz 300SL and the cheap, underpowered offerings coming out of Britain, and that BMW, of all companies, could fill it if it built a proper V8 roadster. BMW, still recovering from wartime devastation and building its reputation mostly on saloons and motorcycles, took the suggestion seriously enough to commission the New York-based, German-born industrial designer Albrecht von Goertz that November to style not one but two related cars: the four-seat 503 coupe and cabriolet, and the two-seat roadster that would become the 507.

What BMW actually built was, by any commercial measure, a disaster it could not afford, and a design triumph it could not stop making anyway. The 507 used a shortened version of the 501/502 saloon platform and a 3,168cc aluminum-block V8 producing 150 hp, wrapped in a hand-formed aluminum body whose low beltline and long hood made it, by wide consensus among design historians, one of the most purely beautiful cars BMW has ever released. The trouble was cost. BMW had planned the 507 as a volume-export product, aiming for production in the low thousands per year at a price point that could compete realistically with imported American iron in the domestic German-luxury-abroad market Hoffman was describing. The actual per-car manufacturing cost, once the hand-built aluminum bodywork and low-volume tooling were accounted for, ran far ahead of what BMW could charge without making the car unsellable next to a 300SL. BMW made and lost money on nearly every one of the 252 examples it built between 1956 and 1959, and the model's losses contributed materially to the broader financial crisis that nearly forced BMW into a takeover before the Quandt family's 1959–1960 investment kept the company independent.

The 507's most famous owner did more for the car's later reputation than any period road test could have. Elvis Presley, stationed with the US Army in West Germany in 1958 and 1959, bought a white 507 for around $3,500, a fraction of what BMW had actually spent to build it. He quickly discovered the hazards of owning a beautiful car in public: female fans left so many lipstick marks on the white paint that Presley eventually had the car repainted red. That single, well-documented anecdote did more to cement the 507 in American popular memory than BMW's own advertising ever managed during the car's actual sales life, and it has followed the model into the modern collector market, where surviving 507s now rank among the most valuable BMWs ever built. The company's accountants in 1959 could not have imagined that reversal of fortune.

BMW would not build another open two-seat roadster with anything like the 507's ambition for four decades. When it finally did, with the Z8 unveiled as a concept at the 1997 Tokyo Motor Show and put into production for the 1999-2000 model year, the connection to the 507 was the entire design brief. BMW handed the project to Danish-American designer Henrik Fisker, who has said in retrospective interviews that he was directed explicitly to draw on the 507's proportions: the long hood, the low beltline, the simple, uncluttered surfacing that had made the earlier car a design landmark even as it bankrupted its maker. Fisker's Z8 wrapped an aluminum spaceframe chassis, structurally more ambitious than anything BMW had built for a low-volume model before, in bodywork that read unmistakably as a modern restatement of the 507 rather than a nostalgia exercise; underneath, it used the 4.9-litre, 400-hp S62 V8 shared with the contemporary E39 M5, paired exclusively with a 6-speed manual transmission in factory form.

Unlike the 507, the Z8 arrived into a cultural moment ready to amplify it immediately. BMW placed the car in the 1999 James Bond film "The World Is Not Enough," continuing the studio relationship the Z3 had begun four years earlier, and the film's plot gave the Z8 a far more dramatic on-screen fate than the Z3's brief cameo: the car is destroyed, cut in half by a helicopter-mounted circular saw in one of the film's more memorably absurd action sequences. Where the Z3's Bond association had been about restrained product placement, the Z8's was staged for spectacle, and it worked: the car became inseparable in enthusiast memory from its Bond role even though, unlike the 507's genuinely humble sales story, the Z8 launched into a market and a media environment primed to treat a low-volume BMW roadster as an event rather than a curiosity.

BMW built the Z8 only through 2003. Wikipedia, Supercars.net and a VIN count on the BMW Z8 Board forum give 5,703 units. Production stayed in the low thousands across a four-year run, consistent with a halo model built to demonstrate engineering and design rather than to move volume. Alpina, the long-standing BMW tuning partner with its own factory-sanctioned status, built a distinct variant late in the run, the Roadster V8, using a softened suspension tune, a revised 4.8-litre V8 rated at 375 hp, and, uniquely among Z8-based cars, the option of an automatic transmission for buyers who wanted the car's presence without its committed manual-gearbox character; Supercars.net puts that variant's run at 555 cars.

Taken together, the 507 and the Z8 form an unusual pair inside BMW's own history: two low-volume, design-led two-seaters built four decades apart, each conceived explicitly to project an image of the company that its balance sheet could not, on its own, support. The 507 nearly broke BMW and left it a design icon anyway; the Z8 arrived once BMW was secure enough to treat that earlier failure as a usable piece of heritage rather than a cautionary tale, and its designer said as much directly. Neither car was ever meant to be a volume seller, and neither one is properly understood by its production figures alone. The story in both cases is what BMW decided a roadster was for, at two very different moments in the company's history.

The Designer Who Got There by Accident

Albrecht von Goertz's path to BMW's studio began nowhere near Munich. Von Goertz fled Nazi Germany for the United States at 24, worked odd jobs, and eventually set up a small shop in Los Angeles customizing Fords, where he built a heavily reworked 1940 Mercury coupe he called the "Paragon." After Army service, he drove the Paragon east to New York and, in a chance roadside encounter, ran into Raymond Loewy, already one of America's best-known industrial designers. Loewy, taken with the car, invited von Goertz into his office, funded his formal design education at Los Angeles's Art Center College of Design, and later put him to work in Loewy's own Studebaker studio in Indiana. Von Goertz set up his own independent design business in 1953 and, through his acquaintance with BMW's New York importer Max Hoffman, was pointed directly to BMW's Munich management. Hoffman was the same man who would go on to press BMW toward building the roadster that became the 507. The commissions that followed, the 503 and 507, gave von Goertz his most enduring work; the accidental sequence of events that put a customized Mercury coupe in front of Raymond Loewy on a New York street is, by published accounts of his career, the entire reason he ended up in Munich at all, rather than staying in the American custom-car scene where he'd started.