THE ULTIMATE ULTIMATE DRIVING EXPERIENCE:DRIVE A BMW ON MARS
IMAGINING THE ULTIMATE DRIVING MACHINE BEYOND EARTH
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BMW’s board in Munich was exploring long-horizon directions for the brand: not the next model cycle, but legacy.
The question was simple and large: What comes after “The Ultimate Driving Machine” when roads, cities, ownership, climate, and mobility itself begin to change?
We were asked to propose bold future trajectories for BMW and I was brought in to lead the visual and conceptual articulation of the Mars direction.
The insight: BMW performance was about the relationship between machine, driver, and terrain. Mars made that relationship extreme.
The project imagined an actual BMW presence on Mars, not as science-fiction decoration, but as a test of brand logic: precision, control, engineering mastery, hostile terrain, human ambition. Our chief scientist approached SpaceX to pressure-test plausibility.
I developed the concept direction for what became the Mars Terrain Initiative: a future-facing brand vision connecting BMW’s present engineering language to environments beyond Earth. The work combined aerospace restraint, German minimalism, technical atmosphere, and existential scale. The goal was make Mars feel like a legitimate next terrain for the brand.
The full version was too ambitious to execute as proposed. BMW later moved the idea into a safer campaign form: an X3 virtual Mars test drive.
For me, the value of the work sits in the original leap.
It reframed “driving” as something deeper than automotive performance: the mastery of terrain, wherever terrain goes next.
The question was simple and large: What comes after “The Ultimate Driving Machine” when roads, cities, ownership, climate, and mobility itself begin to change?
We were asked to propose bold future trajectories for BMW and I was brought in to lead the visual and conceptual articulation of the Mars direction.
The insight: BMW performance was about the relationship between machine, driver, and terrain. Mars made that relationship extreme.
The project imagined an actual BMW presence on Mars, not as science-fiction decoration, but as a test of brand logic: precision, control, engineering mastery, hostile terrain, human ambition. Our chief scientist approached SpaceX to pressure-test plausibility.
I developed the concept direction for what became the Mars Terrain Initiative: a future-facing brand vision connecting BMW’s present engineering language to environments beyond Earth. The work combined aerospace restraint, German minimalism, technical atmosphere, and existential scale. The goal was make Mars feel like a legitimate next terrain for the brand.
The full version was too ambitious to execute as proposed. BMW later moved the idea into a safer campaign form: an X3 virtual Mars test drive.
For me, the value of the work sits in the original leap.
It reframed “driving” as something deeper than automotive performance: the mastery of terrain, wherever terrain goes next.
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