How one man single-handedly gave birth to a whole new kind of car, and a smash hit for BMW

MUNICH, GERMANY — It’s hard to imagine this now, but a station wagon version of the 3 Series was never actually officially planned. Instead, it was the result of an accident — literally. 

Max Roisberg (pictured above), a technician from BMW’s prototype division, bought a used, dented E30 3 Series and thought it might look good as a station wagon. So he built it himself. In his garage, with his own two hands.

His next move was to simply drive to work in it and show it to his bosses. They, in turn, quickly interrupted a board meeting so that the very top management could see the prototype. Eberhard von Kuenheim, the chairman of BMW at the time, and the man credited with turning the company into a global powerhouse, apparently took one look at Roisberg’s homemade wagon and said, “This car never leaves these premises.”

For a moment, Roisberg thought his head was about to roll. Instead, the bosses bundled his prototype away so they could study it in secrecy. 

“It wasn’t hard to convince the board; the big issue with BMW was the internal understanding that a vehicle completely outside of all BMW processes, that was built in a garage, was going to be built with BMW. That needed some convincing,” he says.

Remarkably, Roisberg says that wacky prototypes weren’t all that unusual at the time. “I actually remember that there was a Dutch colleague and also a colleague in Stuttgart who built a 7 Series wagon, and I think we also had a 3 Series in a three-door version, but nobody wanted to have those,” he says. 

At the time, the idea of a compact luxury wagon wasn’t on the radar of any car company, but Roisberg thought it would work. “From my own opinion (a 3 Series wagon) simply fit into the BMW brand,” he says. “I thought it was time.”

Sadly, though his homemade car won the management board over, it met an untimely demise. “Back then, they used (my prototype) for research purposes. Certain experiments had to be conducted at a later point in time, and it was also a matter of storage security, so the Touring was crashed,” he says. “Unfortunately, the beautiful car was simply gone.”

Today, 60 percent of 3 Series cars sold in Germany are Touring models. In Italy, they account for 70 percent of sales.

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