Here's why BMW secretly tests armored cars in Brazil & Mexico

we're in the middle of the desert with like cartels who knows where and you just flip the car we started doing testing with our oxnard california office right so we were naturally better a lot of the infotainment stuff because we were based where we were based and they were they were based in california so it made it a lot easier to go into mexico so the rule was when we were doing prototype development and testing in mexico was we were not allowed to stop for any circumstances whatsoever ever we had armored seven series which by the way were made in mexico as well that's where they made the armored sevens we were trained on the cars of how to operate things like how to make the windshield explode out if you had to and things like that that's essentially if you know all the doors are blocked you get blocked into the car you have an exit point that's why they have the exploding windshields and these cars would have fuel cells in the cars and they would have about a thousand mile range it was a good time it was also very very dangerous time at the same time there was no stopping at 7-eleven if you know what i mean so we'd go basically starting california straight shot so as vision a car full of laptops so one guy driving uh three guys in the car or girls or whatever doing different diagnostics of the car live with laptops in some cases to the extreme of sending software over the internet to germany they would make some changes because we were doing more validation than coding necessarily they'd send it back and we'd actually formulated a method to flash the cars while moving you could only imagine what would happen if somebody would accidentally flash the wrong module and now you got stuck with the car in a very bad place right so that never happened thank god but that could have happened that was always on our minds but that's essentially what it would be very tough days because even that was against policies you know they could only drive six hours a day i think i think that's what it was so we were trying to get to heat conditions we were always working in conjunction with different suppliers so naftec would be there google in one instance was there with us so these people would actually be there with you so that's the idea so some of it was digitizing roads some of it was validating things like satellite radio because that's still technically available in mexico as well and in canada right so things like that and also seeing how the different components would handle the heat and the high stress condition that we created by not stopping for all that time was also a very interesting use case right so you're not stopping for longer than the car can hold fuel because you have this this tank and the trunk this this additional tank of fuel those scenarios would never happen in the real world but we were able to create those scenarios so we we had an instance where we were going to the desert and we were basically that so that day was we're focusing more on navigation and we're driving through the desert and we come off the main road because we're essentially following the lead car we came off the main road and we were driving and what ends up happening in the desert especially if there's like not a lot going on where no one's really doing much with it it's different it's not like the desert in like the middle east there's more dirt and stuff so what ends up happening is you get like these these hills on the side of the road very similar to snow so we were driving and one of the guys got a little bit too close to the edge and he straight up flipped the car in the middle of mexico yeah the car rolls over so he just caught the berm and just we saw it i mean they were like maybe you know we weren't right on top of each other but we could see them it was within viewing distance they just flipped the car over and it was funny this guy was like a typical german engineer he's freaking out about his laptop and his data he's gonna lose all this it's like bro we're in the middle of the desert with like cartels who knows where and you just flip the car like what do we do we left it we left the car somebody went and got it later but we just basically took him out and we left we just left it like that and there was a lot of explaining to do as you can imagine we weren't some little shop some little performance shop right doing stuff this was for a corporate company so something like that happens it's it's a big deal here's the thing right so whatever happened everybody saw right and everything is in data loggers more so than it would be anyway in a car so there's the ubisoft they're called the blue pirate these are the data loggers that bmw would use so it's an additional layer of data logging right there's no hiding what you did so it's not like he wasn't doing anything wrong i'm sure if he was speeding and you know doing donuts or something to flip the car it'd be different but obviously wasn't his fault so plus even look honestly even if it was there's a bunch of engineers on site if something had to be deleted i'm sure people would have done it um to save the guy's job right but it was nothing nothing that you could really blame the guy for this was like a thing that you'd plan you'd plan this for for like a month to make sure everything you know everything was in place uh everybody knew exactly what they had to do when they had to do it because you want to optimize the time as much as possible plus you have external staff you pay right you have security with you and things like that so they need to know what we're going to do because this whole thing we've never we never had an incident when i was there like nothing weird ever happened and if you think about it this was at the time where there was like like there was a freaking cartel war going on right and you have 10 sometimes very expensive cars look going through the desert looking very bad looking like a caravan of who knows maybe other drug dealers for all you know right so you're this huge target and i mean anything could have happened right besides somebody like blocking the road i mean you know they have rocket launchers right like stuff thinking back now because i was younger then all kinds of while should have happened right at the time you had options you can get a air suspension car or you can get a steel suspension car so a little tidbit here is something that's interesting to know if someone happens to have a 760 from those ears right that is a uh is not air suspension it's probably armored because you couldn't get it with air suspension you only could get it with normal coils and you couldn't get a 760 without air suspension they were they were heavier so they did things to compensate for them but just you know acceleration went down significantly right they still handled just as well because of the the modifications of the suspension but there were definitely slower cars but once you got moving you know you're chugging away doing 130 miles an hour in mexico no problems so brazil was a similar situation as mexico and i think the reason why we got to do brazil was because we showed that we could do that right so at one point bmw actually came up with this deal with the brazilian government that we as a car company alongside i believe it was naftak at the time would digitize the roads so what we got out of it was we got good maps for our cars but the data would be made available to everyone as far as anything was concerned we were working directly with the government of brazil on this which is pretty amazing so we had all of their support so we flew cars in flew them in into brazil we had our own security team so machine guns everything you can imagine because we needed it frankly brazil is a it's a beautiful place it's a dangerous place and we were there at the worst time formula one was going on so not gonna lie was definitely a good time but no one was going anywhere by themselves because we were targets to get kidnapped or who knows what else that was essentially brazil we digitized the whole country was an interesting way to see the country right and it's something that i i will always hold under my belt saying that i help with that which is which is kind of cool but there was just a lot of weird stuff going on in in brazil if you know what i mean right so the fact that the government basically wanted us to come in and they struck up this deal with the government and there was a lot of government support when we were there like military and things like that it was just it didn't seem like i was going to work that day realized my normal environment was in a test lab in an office or whatever right next thing you know we're staying in the jungle overnight in the middle of brazil with security guards and stuff it was definitely an out-of-body experience i'd say something you don't get to experience in a normal day we did all the main roads so all the major major roads that people would drive on and then there was a secondary team that came in through naftac that had those cars that had the big things on top so we basically formed the basis and then they came in and did all the other all the other stuff that's those you ever see cars that have the big dome on top that's what those are so it's just the 3d maps so that's what you see the 3d maps but it's also doing the digitalization of the roads and stuff so we did the major stuff and then there was an additional team that came in and came in and filled in the rest so we were in a ground in brazil for two weeks and we had armored sevens the security we had with the machine guns they had range rovers range over sports it was like a movie i mean there's no other way to put it it felt like a if if i had uh two bad cell phones when it was popular back that probably would have got fired like videotaping that kind of stuff it was definitely different [Music] you

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 133,282

Keywords: BMW, secret, testing, vinwiki, car stories, patrick cupillari, mexico, brazil, test drive, navteq, nda, highway, accident, armored cars, cartel, travel, south america

Id: D96mQaB52W0

Length: 9min 21sec (561 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021