BMW’s Lost Streamliner Experiments, 1938

In the back of my archive, tucked between brittle workshop notes and a few oil-smudged photographs, sits one of my favorite anomalies: a 1938 BMW blueprint for the Kamm-styled 328 streamliner.

Most people think of the pre-war BMWs as light, simple sports cars — open-top, wire-wheeled machines dancing up the Alps. But the documents I’ve collected over the years suggest a stranger, more ambitious parallel universe inside Eisenach’s drafting rooms. They weren’t just building roadsters; they were sketching wind-cheating shapes that looked like they belonged on the Autobahn of 1958, not 1938.

This particular blueprint is the perfect example. It’s wrinkled and water-stained, but the intent still radiates from the paper: a teardrop profile, cabin pulled tight, Kamm tail trimmed like a scientist’s haircut, and the kind of technical labeling that German engineers have probably been born knowing since the Stone Age. “Kompressormotor.” “Auspuffkrümmer.” “Notorhaube geöffnet.” Even the handwriting looks aerodynamic.

No one calls it the “streamliner” on the page. The Germans preferred “Stromlinienwagen” or simply “Limousine,” as if this thing were meant to ferry diplomats rather than slice through air at 200 km/h. But that’s the charm of these pre-war oddities — every document hints at an automotive world trying to reinvent itself in real time, unconcerned with what would later be considered normal.

And that’s why I keep collecting them. These artifacts are reminders that before the war reshaped everything, BMW engineers were already dreaming in blueprints like this — bold lines on blue paper, imagining a future they never quite got to finish.

Someday I’ll share more of these strange, wonderful relics. For now, this one feels like the right place to start.