Bavarian Motor Works, commonly known as BMW, is a German automobile, motorcycle and engine manufacturing company founded in 1916 and headquartered in Munich, Germany. BMW also owns and produces MINI cars and is the parent company of Rolls-Royce. BMW was established through a restructuring of the Rapp Motorenwerke aircraft manufacturing firm in 1917 but didn’t begin producing cars and motorcycles in earnest until 1928. The circular blue and white BMW logo or roundel evolved from the Rapp Motorenwerke company logo combined with the blue and white colors of the flag of Bavaria. The logo has been portrayed as the movement of an aircraft propeller with the white blades cutting through a blue sky — first used in a BMW advertisement in 1929, twelve years after the roundel was created — but this is not the origin of the logo itself. In the late 1960s, the unassuming little BMW 2002 started appearing on US roads. Light, fuel-efficient, and agile like a sports car, it also had four comfortable seats and legroom. The 2002 embodied for Americans an entirely new concept: the sports sedan. Today, BMW produces a line of premium cars and crossovers with a decidedly sporty bent.

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